


Between the Lines

by Jacqueline Albright-Beckett (xaandria)



Series: Between The Lines [32]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Destiel - Freeform, Domesticity, Drabbles, Ficlets, Fluff, M/M, Smut, collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-08 08:17:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 42
Words: 22,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaandria/pseuds/Jacqueline%20Albright-Beckett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of the Destiel drabbles, ficlets, and shorts that I write when the mood moves me.</p><p>Not all tags and warnings apply to all entries. Rated for the random explicit content. Most entries hover closer to T. YMMV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. FICLET: Freckles

Dean tried to ignore that, as was frequently the case, Castiel was standing uncomfortably close. “No gas stations between here and Missoula, so remind me to...” From the corner of his eye Dean saw a tuft of dark hair and he glanced over, only to get a very close view of Castiel’s face peering intently at his. “Cas? What are you looking at?”

“You have freckles.”

Dean’s hand was already halfway up to his face as though to brush them off before he realized it and let it drop. “Yeah, so?”

“I have never noticed them before.” Castiel was, if anything, closer, his nose nearly touching Dean’s cheek. “How is it I’ve never noticed them?”

“Um.” Dean felt himself going cross-eyed as he continued to try and watch Castiel’s intent observation. “Hell if I know. They usually only show up in the summer.”

“They’re fascinating.”

Dean closed his eyes. “Cas, stop - stop stroking my face.”

“You even have them on your ears.”

 “Cas.” The problem was, he didn’t sound very insistent. The angel’s inquisitive fingers were surprisingly gentle, leaving a silk-soft trail of remembered touch behind them as they played over his earlobe. The hairs at the back of his neck stood up as he sensed more than felt Castiel switch sides to investigate the other ear.

_You could kiss him right now._

The thought came unbidden, unannounced, suddenly looming large in his cerebrum like an enormous echo. Dean’s eyes flew open and he took a step back, raising his hands to ward off Castiel’s attentions. “Woah. Okay. That’s enough of that.”

He wasn’t sure whether he was addressing Castiel or himself, but either way, he felt a vague disappointment that he turned all his attentions to denying as he yanked open the door of the Impala.


	2. FICLET: Thirty Years of Photographs

Dean’s shoulder stiffens when bad weather is coming; sometimes it’s so bad he doesn’t do much other than sit on a kitchen chair - anything softer hurts his back - and roll it on occasion. Really, when Castiel stops to consider it, Dean’s entire body probably aches when the weather changes, and the shoulder is just something he can isolate from everything else. It’s no use limping when both knees hurt, after all.

It sometimes surprises Castiel, because he didn’t see the changes happening - but when he compares Dean now to the Dean of thirty years ago, it is startling. His hair is a mosaic of gray peppered with his original dark brown; there is a decided slump to his posture; even his voice has aged, though only to become richer and warmer with time. And when Castiel looks in the mirror, he’s sometimes surprised to see the face looking back at him, as well. Growing old was not something he’d ever considered.

There is a pressure front moving in this morning. Castiel can tell as soon as Dean shifts and groans slightly as he reaches for the glasses on the bedside table. “Damn shoulder.”

“Wimp.” Castiel reaches over to press a thumb to Dean’s aching muscles, the same way Dean used to do for him, long ago when his shoulders ached from holding wings that were no longer there. “You should have taken better care of yourself.”

Dean smirks. “Didn’t think I’d live this long.” He winces and rolls his shoulder away. Castiel relents; sometimes the stiffness won’t yield to anything but time.

It doesn’t yield, this time. The ache spreads down Dean’s left arm throughout the day, despite the mild spring outside. And even though all the television commercials for aspirin say that it saves lives, it fails today.

Castiel had never considered growing old, but he’d accepted it as a thing that would happen. Perhaps in time he’d accept growing old alone, with only thirty years of photographs to remind him of who he’d intended to grow old with.


	3. FICLET: Vivid

_Dean moaned as Cas gently dragged his teeth along Dean’s neck, letting his eyes half-close in bliss as he twitched his hips upward. “None of that now,” Cas murmured against Dean’s neck, breath cool against the wet patch where he’d been sucking, “be still.”_

_“So close, Cas,” Dean whined, the urge to grip Cas’s hips and drive himself deep into the other man so overwhelming that he could think of little else._

_“Be still,” Cas repeated, one hand trailing across Dean’s chest to circle a nipple. He shifted ever so slightly, and the resulting friction around Dean’s cock made him gasp._

_“Cas, please,” he breathed, struggling feebly against Cas’s grip on his wrists above his head. It wasn’t even a tight grip; Dean could slip free at any time, if he really wanted to. He didn’t. He just knew that Cas liked it when he tried._

_Sure enough, the “Not yet” that Cas growled into his ear was just slightly more sex-roughed than his previous murmurs had been. He sucked Dean’s earlobe into his mouth and teased at it with his teeth as he rolled his hips forward agonizingly slowly, drawing a long, guttural moan from Dean as he fought against the visceral need to buck his hips up to meet that shift._

_Suddenly, Cas pushed himself up, the change in angle forcing Dean to give voice to a shout as he struggled to keep himself from that precipice he was in danger of toppling over. Cas had been nudging him closer and closer for nearly thirty minutes now, though it seemed like so much longer, and every inch of Dean’s skin was hypersensitive and flushed, his balls just beginning to ache with the need for release._

_And Cas knew it. He always knew, always knew when it was just at the brink of too much. He released Dean’s wrists and brought one of Dean’s hands up to grip his own cock. “Bring me off,” he whispered, heavy-lidded eyes locking on Dean’s. “You can come when I do.”_

_Dean grit his teeth and began stroking, the slow, firm pulls that he knew Cas liked, and as Cas tensed around his cock he was absolutely lost -_

Dean’s eyes flew open to the dark room, his sheets a tangled mess, and without thought he reached down and grasped his cock. One, two, three strokes was all it took before he came, hard enough that he canted his head back against his pillows and bit his lip to block the moan that had built in his throat. Very, very slowly, he relaxed, still pulling at his spent cock as he rode out the last of his orgasm.

He blinked as he became more fully awake, breathing hard and skin tingling.

That had been a very vivid sex dream.

About Cas.

“Son of a bitch,” he murmured to himself, looking over at the sofa bed that he could just barely see in the dark, where Cas’s blanket-wrapped shape was only barely visible in the darkness. “I do. I want to fuck your goddamn brains out.”

Lethargy stole over him and he closed his eyes, fairly certain that he should be more concerned about this revelation than he was, and the last thought before sleep claimed him once more was a wordless hum of contentment.


	4. FICLET: A Promise

Cas seems nervous tonight.

He covers it well, but Dean has seen every corner of him, examined every minute shade of his moods, and he is nervous. It’s in the way he keeps sipping at his water during the meal, the way he stands up from his chair when they are done.

They’re walking to the car when Cas slips his hand into Dean’s. Dean glances over in mild surprise; Cas is not much one for public displays of affection. The smile that Cas returns is a little flustered.

“Okay, what’s up?” Dean asks, stopping them on the sidewalk.

“Nothing,” Cas says innocently. Too innocently. Dean snorts.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Really,” Cas insists. “Let’s just - let’s keep walking. It’s a nice night.”

And that is more suspicious than anything else; not that Cas wants to keep walking, because it is a nice night, but that he would suggest it as if it were something they wouldn’t normally do anyway. And he’s still holding Dean’s hand. Dean raises an eyebrow and decides to go with it.

He expects Cas to stay silent. The silences between them have never been uncomfortable; they had always felt like a tiny world of their own, an envelope in the world of chaos that they alone shared. So Dean is surprised again when Cas suddenly takes a breath.

“I swear I’ve done research,” he says, pausing by the railing of a riverside scenic point on the opposite side of an ice cream shop, windows dark as it waited for tomorrow. “And this is supposed to be done someplace significant.” He swallows, and Dean’s suspicion at Cas’s behavior is replaced by a strange, unreal sensation of entering into an important moment. “But - well, everywhere I’ve gone with you has been significant. Because it’s been with you.” Cas turned to look at their surroundings. “This is a good place, though.”

Dean licked his lips. “I accidentally said I loved you here.”

The nervous grin on Cas’s face lit it up like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. “I know. Right at this spot.” The smile didn’t disappear, exactly, but it became slightly stiffer as whatever was making Cas nervous returned to his thoughts. “I wouldn’t ever ask this of you if I didn’t mean it,” he said suddenly, and now the smile was gone entirely, Cas looked very seriously into Dean’s face, chin tilted up slightly. “Really mean it. And - it means a little more than what it sounds like in the traditional words, but there aren’t really words for my particular situation.”

He grinned again, with a little exhalation that was meant to be a laugh, and dropped down and knelt on the sidewalk. “I’m also supposed to do this.”

Dean blinks, a sudden shot of adrenaline thrumming through him as Cas reached up to take Dean’s hand in one of his, the other pulling a box from his pocket. “Holy shit,” he blurts without thinking.

Cas laughs, bowing his head and shaking it before lifting his face to look up at Dean again. “Dean. Dean Winchester. I want to spend my life with you. Grow old with you. I assume we’d do that anyway, but - I’d like to promise you that I’ll do it.” He flips open the top of the box, and Dean can see the glint of metal in it. “Will you marry me?”

Dean cannot hold back the laugh that has been bubbling at the back of his throat since he realized what Cas was about to do, and it bursts from him in such force that he drops to his knees on the sidewalk as well. Or, at least, that’s what he hopes it looks like to Cas as he draws a box from his own pocket.

“You beat me to the punch,” Dean says, swallowing hard against the tears that have begun to stand in his eyes - from the laughing, he tells himself, not because he’s a sentimental sop. “I was gonna ask you when we got to the car.” He chuckled as he opened the box. “I even had a little speech. Wasn’t as nice as yours, though.”

Cas looks at the ring in Dean’s box in amazement. “I take it you accept my offer, then?” He looks up, a ridiculous, goofy grin spreading across his face.

“Do you accept mine? Will you marry me?” Dean offers Cas the box.

“Of course.”

“Then yes.”

Dean doesn’t pay attention to the way his knees are beginning to ache against the concrete; he reaches forward and draws Cas against him, opting to press their hearts together in a hug rather than kiss him - for now.

There are still people walking past on the sidewalk; Dean can tell that they are being stared at, comprehension dawning as the onlookers see what they are holding in their hands, and he knows they are drawing smiles from their audience. He shuts his eyes and pulls Cas closer. The words have been said, and now their envelope of quiet isolates them from the world of chaos around them.


	5. FICLET: Safe

Very suddenly and startlingly awake, Dean reached for the knife on his nightstand before his eyes were even fully open, scissoring his legs to get out from under the blankets and his feet under him.

“I’m sorry!” came a familiar voice, sounding horrified, and because Dean had never heard this voice in this context it took his sleep-sluggish mind a moment to place it.

He huffed a large, relieved sigh and threw the knife back to the table. “Cas. Don’t - don’t _do_ that.”

In the dark, Dean could only barely see Cas holding up his hands sheepishly. “Sorry. I...had a dream. And I needed to make sure you were all right.”

The adrenaline rushing through Dean’s body was starting to go sour with its uselessness, and he sat back on the bed, still shaking slightly. “First time you ever had a nightmare?”

“It was remarkably vivid. I thought...but no.” Cas shook his head, intertwining his fingers and staring at them.

“Thought what?”

“I thought maybe it was a vision. That I hadn’t lost everything, after all.” Cas shrugged, not lifting his eyes. “I used to get them, you know. When you or Sam were in danger. Like a wordless prayer. You probably didn’t even know you were sending them.”

Dean hadn’t. A lot of near misses suddenly made a lot more sense. He looked at Cas again - really looked at him. Shoulders held back, with plenty of space between himself at the dresser behind him; Cas still had the spatial awareness of his wings, still held himself as though they were something he needed to support. The distracted expression, as though he were listening for something that wasn’t there but should be.

It had been weeks. To Dean, it seemed like a lifetime, but to someone who could recount the march of eons...Cas had Fallen practically yesterday.

Something twinged deep inside his chest, and he patted the bed next to him. “C’mere.” Confused, Cas moved slowly around the foot of the bed to take the proffered space, and flinched slightly when Dean put his arm around him. “You’re a bit old for it, but...” Dean could feel a blush working its way up his cheeks, and he was grateful for the darkness to hide it. “When Sammy would have nightmares, I’d get him a glass of water and tuck him into my bed and tell him stories until he fell back asleep. When he was little,” he clarified. “I mean, they were identical beds in a shitty motel, but for some reason being in mine made him feel better.” He shrugged, starting to feel foolish. “I dunno, I -”

“I’d like that,” Cas said in a small voice.

Mouth suddenly dry for no reason, Dean stood, freeing the blankets so Cas could slide under them. The glass at the bathroom sink was reasonably clean, and Cas didn’t drink more than a sip from it anyway before placing it carefully next to the knife on the bedside table.

“What was it about?” Dean asked, somehow feeling out of place as he sat down on the other side of the bed.

Cas was quiet for a moment before he answered. “I couldn’t save you,” he said simply.

Dean waited for more, but nothing else came. “Oh,” he said finally.

The faint sound of the refrigerator humming to life gave a low background to their silence. Dean cleared his throat. “So which story do you want to hear? I do all the voices for the three little pigs.”

“Just you being here is enough.” Cas’s voice was starting to grow thick with sleep, and he pulled a blanket up more tightly over his shoulder. “Think I understand Sam now.”

“Hm?”

“This is where safety sleeps.”

While Dean was trying to figure out what to say to that, he could hear Cas’s breathing become deep and even. Idly, he wondered if he should go sleep in Cas’s bed down the hall, now that this one was occupied.

No, he decided, surprising himself with the honesty of it. No. The idea of Cas being near as he fell asleep touched a small thrill in his stomach, a tiny spark to add to the growing collection that he would have to examine sooner or later.

Besides, he’d slept on the bed that was in Cas’s room, and it didn’t hold a candle to his memory foam.

Moving slowly to avoid waking the man on the other side of the bed, Dean slipped under the blankets and rested his head on the pillow. It felt strange, having the blankets drape over another form before they draped over his.

It felt nice.

His musing was starting to dissolve into the senseless continuum of nonsense when Cas turned over, arm falling over Dean’s shoulders and jolting him awake again. Dean nearly said something, nearly got out of bed to go down to Cas’s room, but then Cas pulled Dean close.

“Keep you safe,” Cas murmured, and he sounded so content that Dean didn’t have the heart - nor, he admitted, the inclination - to break away.

He closed his eyes again, feeling Cas’s chest rise and fall against his back, and was surprised to find that as slumber stole over him like warm water, he did feel safe.


	6. FICLET: Simple Truth

The fog on the mirror was a thick velvety frost; Cas wiped it away, but the steam in the bathroom obscured the trails his fingers made nearly as soon as they left the glass. Cas left it; he liked the indistinct impression of his reflection, a dark blur among the white. He hummed softly to himself as he carded his fingers through his hair, longer now than it had been when he Fell, prone to unruliness and sometimes ringlets at the back of his neck as it dried. Dean had flicked at these once, making some remark about mullets and finding a barber, but by the way Dean had looked pointedly at Sam at the latter half of the statement, Cas suspected that the remark had not been entirely for him.

Cas liked showers. He liked standing with his eyes closed under the hot spray, as hot as he could make it, mentally following the sensation of the water pounding at the crown of his head, joining in rivulets running down his back and legs before joining the pool at his feet.He liked the pink flush of his skin as he stepped out. He liked the plush of the fresh towel as he pressed it to his face, deeply inhaling the scent of fresh linen. He liked letting the water drop off him in the steamy bathroom, listening to his tuneless humming bounce off the tiles in a belated answering echo.

At night, while the boys were asleep, he would indulge himself in all the hot water the Bunker’s prodigious water heater would allow, sometimes letting the water run out entirely just for the sensation of standing under the freezing cascade with goosebumps and shallow gasps for the few seconds he could bear it before jumping out. On occasion he would turn the showerhead to its massage setting and let it beat at his shoulders, where the muscles that remembered wings ached with the loss.

Dean was awake when Cas wandered into the kitchen in his bathrobe, hair beginning to drip again despite its vigorous rub with a towel. “If we had a water bill, I’d yell at you,” Dean said before lifting the bottle of beer to his lips.

Cas had tried to explain to Dean about showers, but Dean already knew too much about showers. They were dull, matter-of-fact, a chore to fit in between sleeps. Showers were so indoctrinated into Dean’s life that he’d never had the wonder of discovery. Cas had once suggested that they take a shower together so he could better explain, not realizing that he was breaking dozens of taboos - masculinity, nakedness, sexuality, and countless others that were so easy to list but difficult to fathom or explain - and he had since given up trying to explain.

Instead, Cas merely shrugged. “I like showers,” he said simply. It was a simple truth, after all, and since being human was a maze of convoluted truths twined about themselves in a tangled mass, the simple truths were worth stating, because they could be.

Dean shrugged; Cas watched his shoulders rise and fall beneath the cotton of his shirt. “Whatever floats your boat. ‘Night.” He left the kitchen and Cas turned to watch him go, disappearing around the corner into the hallway that led to the bedrooms.

Now that was a complicated truth, one that transcended words. Cas had never had occasion to form a sexual identity; in an angel’s true form it was irrelevant, and within a vessel such a thing would have been distracting. But so many sparks were falling amongst the tinder and smoldering that Cas did not have to smell the smoke to know the truth: Cas liked Dean.

What should have been a simple truth grew more complicated every time he tried to do something about it; it caught at his tongue whenever he tried to say anything, gripped at his chest whenever he tried to act. And so it remained buried, smoldering in hot tendrils, ready to burst into flame at the slightest provocation - and Cas didn’t have the faintest idea of what he might do when it did.

Best to just stick to the simple truths, then, and leave untangling the difficult truths to the ones who had been human for longer than he. Maybe someday he would understand showers too well, and then he could tackle the tempest that rose within him when he looked at Dean, the complicated truth made easier by its layered simple truths that he finally understood.

Cas liked showers. For now, that was good enough.


	7. FICLET: So It Goes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: What you think is going to happen happens. It is not happy. If you know your Vonnegut, you already know what is going to happen.

Cas wasn’t a stranger to pain or blood; one really couldn’t be when one’s closest companions were the Winchesters. So, knowing he was down for the count, he dragged himself to the side, out of the way, and rode the spiking waves of pain that waxed and waned, pressing his hand against the gash across his leg.

Even with the pressure, the bloodstain beneath his palm was growing at an alarming rate; he didn’t dare move his hand to assess the damage but his mind raced as it named all the blood vessels of the upper leg. Most of them were deep but that knife had been sharp and the thrust behind it very strong…

“Cas!” Dean was kneeling beside him, barely controlled panic in his eyes. “You do not look good. Sam. Belt. Now.”

Cas was surprised to find that he was having trouble focusing his eyes; everything seemed so clear inside his mind. He opened his mouth but the words he wanted to say couldn’t make it to his tongue.

“Don’t talk,” Sam said intently, winding his belt around the top of Cas’s thigh. “This’ll hurt.”

And it did - distantly, as though it was happening to someone else. Dean was pulling the strap of leather as tightly as it would go and it kept slipping on the blood-soaked denim, unable to find the purchase to deliver the pressure it was meant to.

It occurred to Cas that he was probably dying. He wasn’t technically a stranger to that, either, but knowing that it was happening was a new experience - it had always been a rather sudden occurrence before.

“It won’t stop.” Sam sounded panicked.

“Like hell it won’t.” Dean grunted and pulled harder on the makeshift tourniquet. “You still with me, Cas?” He reached up to grasp at Cas’s hand. Cas grounded himself in the sensation, using it as an anchor to keep him connected to what was happening, to deny the clouds of ink at the edge of his vision.

“Get under his arms.” Dean’s voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “We gotta get him to the car.”

“Dean.” It was so hard, harder than it should have been, to force the name from his mouth. He felt more than saw the motion around him pause, Dean looking up with the worry plain in his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The smile that Dean forced to his face was torturous to behold. “Nothing to be sorry about, Cas. We all get bloodied up now and again -”

“No. That I… never said.” In a distant drone, Cas could hear Sam speaking - _an ambulance_ , the portion of his brain that was still working supplied, _he’s calling an ambulance_. “I love you.”

His eyes. That’s where Cas could see everything begin to break down - not the way his smile slid from his face as his jaw went slack or the way Dean’s hand gripped his more tightly. It was in his eyes.

It had always been in his eyes.

A split second later, Dean had regained what composure he could. “We’ll - we’ll have to talk about that later. Because I -” Dean swallowed and shook his head fiercely. “There is going to be a later,” he said forcefully, determination giving his voice a backbone of steel. “Stay with me, Cas, you hear me? There’s an ambulance coming, and they’ll - they’ll fix you up shiny and new. You won’t even have to bleed on my car.”

Cas was only catching one word in three; things were taking a long time to process. It was like the old days, years ago, when he could stretch or condense his sense of time at will, except it was happening on its own and his sensory input couldn’t keep up -

He felt Dean squeeze his hand again. It felt different; Cas looked down and brought all his effort to bear on focusing his eyes. Dean had both hands firmly clasped around one of his, and he was saying…something.

“…you too, you son of a bitch. There. I said it. Are you happy?”

“Yes,” Cas said.

Or thought he said.

He could follow the thought in his mind down the neurons to his muscles, but he wasn’t altogether sure the command continued past that. He tried again, but became distracted by how dark it had become - Dean was a darker shadow against dim lights

an ache stabbed somewhere

“Cas, you can’t. You can’t just leave.”

gasping did nothing his limbs were heavy

“Cas!”

the room spun lazy circles eyes closed against the mayhem

“Cas…please…”

stillness…except

“I still need you.”


	8. DRABBLE: Beds

The mattress Cas chose is a firm, no-nonsense queen size number with just enough cushion to make it a suitable sleeping surface. It’s a far cry from Dean’s memory foam. One almost an act of penance, the other an open display of indulgence. Even their sheets speak volumes, Dean opting for the highest thread count the store had, while Cas insists on a plain jersey knit.

They don’t know about their differences in sleeping preferences, of course. It matters little to either of them. But Cas sleeps on the right side of his bed, and Dean sleeps on the left side of his, and neither understands why, even when tailored exactly to their tastes, their beds feel so unsatisfying.


	9. FICLET: Peeling Potatoes

He was slicing carrots. Cas was peeling potatoes at the sink. The sizzle of the beef and onions in the bottom of the stew pot and their accompanying savory aroma filled the air. Things were _normal._

And then Dean had looked up, about to say something - what exactly had completely abandoned him - and his eyes caught at Cas’s steady hands, drawing the knife’s edge along the skins precisely, not a wasted motion as the peels curled into the bottom of the sink, all in one piece. His face wasn’t intent or lost in thought, but calm; he was focused on what his hands were doing, giving it the requisite attention but not to the exclusion of all else.

The movements were so ordinary, his eyes so content, everything from the set of his shoulders down to his bare feet so at odds with the shape of Castiel inhabiting Dean’s mind that it made him blink.

Cas seemed to sense Dean’s eyes; he glanced over, his hands not stopping their work. “How many did you want?” he asked, indicating the small pile of peeled potatoes next to him on a towel.

Somehow Dean’s mouth was very dry. “That’s good,” he managed, forcing his voice to be even but only managing gruff. He wrenched his eyes back down to his carrots. They were uneven, haphazardly cut, and he set his mind to the task of undoing the damage, ignoring the sudden flush of heat that had begun creeping up the back of his neck.

In that strange, oddly removed moment of normalcy, he’d seen Cas not as a fallen angel, or as his friend; he’d almost been a stranger, and the process that had run through Dean’s mind had come to the conclusion that the stranger was attractive. Someone Dean wouldn’t mind touching - a hand resting on the shoulder, or maybe pressing lightly at the small of the back. Someone Dean wouldn’t mind touching _him_ , with those careful hands given a new objective more suited to their supple dexterity.

The realization stunned him, and its implications began percolating through Dean’s mind with such force that the carrots lay forgotten in front of him.

That Cas was a man was really beside the point. Dean had known for some time now that gender was not as insurmountable an issue to him as he’d been brought up to believe; knowing that and being at peace with it, however,  were two completely different animals, ones that he had always assumed he would wrestle with when he had the energy. Or a good reason. Like the one rinsing the knife in the sink before he cubed the peeled potatoes.

Because of course it was Cas. It was painfully obvious, now that he had seen it; it had always been Cas. Dean stared unseeing at the carrots as it dawned on him that he’d never even noticed the slow, steady spiral of falling in love, but it was undeniably there now: a great yawning sensation in his chest that had hidden for - for who even knew how long - waiting for this exact moment.

This moment of mundane domesticity, devoid of demons or monsters or angels, free of fear or urgency, when he could look up and see a man peeling potatoes and finally feel for the first time.

And then Cas looked up, mouth open to ask a question about his potatoes, and Dean found that he’d abandoned his carrots and had been staring at Cas for some time now.

“Dean?” he asked uncertainly.

The words were there, perhaps not the ones that Dean wanted to say, but words were there and ready to pour out. He almost reached up to cross the space between them, pull Cas closer, and say everything without even using words.

Instead, he blinked, and closed his mouth. This was a fragile thing. It needed the same slow, circling approach with which it had gripped him, lest he break it with haste.

“Can we talk? After dinner?” he asked instead, choosing his words carefully.

Cas’s brow furrowed in bewilderment, but Dean thought he saw the tiniest flickering of understanding, as well. “Of course.”

Dean could see the play of a smile at the corners of Cas’s eyes and he very nearly smiled in return.

Cas returned to his potatoes. Dean watched him; the set of his shoulders, down to his bare feet on the tile, settled into a new shape in his mind. It was still Cas. But now it was Cas as Dean had always known him, but had simply never _seen_ with anything other than his eyes.

And, in the way of all things that are new, it was brimming with potential.


	10. FICLET: Piece of the Moon

The rain was filtering down through the dregs of the stubborn icy slush of the last snowstorm, turning the world a sodden gray that perfectly reflected Cas’s current emotional state - although some threatening rumbles of thunder wouldn’t have gone amiss.

“It’s important to me,” he said in a low voice, almost a growl, as he strode over to the passenger door of the car to wait for Dean to unlock it.

But Dean didn’t. He squared his shoulders, obviously annoyed, and crossed his arms, ignoring the icy rain as it battered a steady staccato on the hood of the car. “Why? Why is it so damn important to you that we do something? I ignore it. Always have. It’s just marking time. It’s nothing special.”

If Dean was using this tactic to shorten the argument, it wasn’t going to work. Cas was far more practiced in ignoring stimuli like temperature. “It is. It’s the day you were born, Dean. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes it to the highlight reel in my abbreviated history of the world.”

“I refuse to fight about this again,” Dean said forcefully, shaking his head. “I don’t  _want_  anything. I don’t want to  _do_ anything. I want it to be just another day like any other, because it is. It’s not special.  _I’m_  not special, whatever you seem to think.”

The knot of frustration that had been tightening in Cas’s chest since they’d woken up this morning snapped, and two steps brought him chest-to-chest with Dean, nearly touching, the uneven ground beneath their feet working in his favor to bring him to eye level. “Don’t ever say that. Ever. The stars applauded the day you were born. I was  _there_. Do you know how long I waited for you, without even knowing what I was waiting for? Do you know what it felt like when I first laid eyes on you, there in Hell, and  _knew_?”

Dean’s jaw had dropped slightly in surprise; he took a breath as though to say something, but Cas barreled on. “Forget the grand schemes of Heaven and Hell and Earth - you are the single shining beacon in my life, and I swear I will bring you a piece of the moon if only it would make you see that, if only it would make you happy for one thin sliver of a moment.”

The frigid rain had begun to plaster Dean’s hair to his head. Cas knew he couldn’t look much better, suppressing a shiver as a trickle of water stole down the back of his neck. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as he exhaled. “I’m - we’re - mortal. I have a finite number of opportunities to make you smile. I’m not going to waste them.”

Dean licked his lips, eyes now soft and devoid of the hard shell of self-defense he’d been wearing all morning. “Cas. I woke up this morning. You were there. If I’m lucky, it’ll happen tomorrow, too. That’s all I want. To keep waking up. You to be there. Sammy in the next room. Everyone still alive and whole.” He reached up to push the wet hair from his forehead. “The odds are against me. Any day I beat ‘em…that’s a good day.”

They had reached the part of the argument where anything else said would ruin whatever fragile truce they’d come to, so Cas remained silent while Dean reached behind him with the keys and unlocked the car door. The silence congealed around them as Dean turned the engine over, and by the time they were merging onto the freeway, it was palpably thick, and Cas didn’t know how to break it.

Dean cleared his throat hesitantly. “If…if you wanted to take me to that little Greek place. The one we went to on our first date.” He swallowed. “That’d be okay.” He looked over, eyebrows raised. “But no singing ‘Happy Birthday.’”

Cas exhaled sharply in what could almost be a relieved laugh. “Fair enough.”

The rain was still falling, and the skies were still gray and flat, but they were inside and sheltered from it, the heat from the vents slowly thawing them. Cas found that strangely fitting to his mood, too, and no longer wished for thunder.


	11. FICLET: The Shape of It

Dean isn’t used to this.

He knows the shape of it, the bullet points, but the details - Cas’s stubble scratching against his neck as he lavishes it with kisses, Cas’s erection grinding against his own - the details are new and they startle him even as they make his blood pump hotter, make him give loose to wordless murmurs as he bucks his hips against the firmness, trying desperately to feel along the entirety of Cas’s length with his own.

And Cas, celibate, virginal Cas - of course this is all new to him but there is no shame, no hesitation - he seems to know the procedure and has given himself wholly over to it, and Dean surrenders himself to Cas’s somehow knowing touches and nudges as flannel and cotton and denim are shed in quick succession, leaving them in their skin and sweat. Cas tastes salty on Dean’s tongue and he exhales in a hushed whimper against Dean’s ear as Dean reaches down and pushes gently against Cas’s threshold. “There. Yes. Please, Dean.”

And Dean wants nothing more than to push himself inside but he knows better, knows that there are extra steps, that this isn’t slick wetness and soft folds and he panics slightly because he knows what to do but he doesn’t know how  _he_  is supposed to do it. He very nearly apologizes - very nearly pushes Cas off him - but then Cas’s hand slides next to his and they are both inside, and Cas knowing what he needs somehow calms Dean down. The wave of panic recedes and the lust builds again. Their fingers slide against each other, the lube growing warm with Cas’s body heat. “You’re perfect,” Cas whispers voicelessly against Dean’s ear, as Dean adds another finger, “perfect.”

And then Cas - he’s shifting, and he reaches between them and grasps at Dean’s cock and Dean holds his breath as Cas slowly sinks down, head canted back, jaw slack, the very image of bliss. Dean can’t tear his eyes away, can’t stop the  _whoosh_ of exhalation as the sensation of being surrounded and deep and _inside_  suffuses every nerve and collects like fire in his bones.

They move, in a rhythm of sorts, not exactly together, rocking and thrusting and gasping, Cas mouthing what looks like Enochian with his eyes shut tight and he looks so damn beautiful that Dean doesn’t want to blink.

It’s over too soon. So transfixed by the fallen angel above him, his ecstasy painted so plain upon his face, Dean can’t hold himself back any more than he could have held back the moonlight. He comes in jolting pulses that rip from his spine and he’s never felt it that deep, as though everything he is has rushed out of him, his ears ringing. He shouts just as Cas reaches his own climax, spilling himself against Dean’s chest. Dean thrusts upwards once more and lies still as Cas drags one of their discarded pairs of boxers across his chest in a cursory wipe before lowering himself atop Dean, hearts beating in time against one another’s ribs.

They haven’t spoken a word for long minutes, now, but the silence is thick and languid and it seems a shame to break it with something so banal as speech as Cas rolls off from his perch atop Dean. A kiss, slow and thorough and exhausted, will have to do until they can bring themselves back to the capacity for speech, but it won’t be tonight - Cas pulls up the sheet and draws it over them both.

Dean listens to Cas breathe as he recedes into the warmth of sleep. He’s not used to this. But he knows the shape of it, and he knows the shape of Cas, and there is no question in his mind that this is something he will quickly grow accustomed to.


	12. FICLET: Done, Part I

Cas didn’t know how they had ended up here. The adrenaline was running its sharp tongues through his body and he felt intoxicated in the worst way, as though he was shut into a corner of his mind and was being forced to watch himself say and do the things he’d always locked up before, had kept tightly fettered for years because they were hurtful and toxic and wrong. But they flowed forth now, unchecked and nauseatingly bitter and every single one finding its target.

And Dean? Dean had adopted that sickly sarcastic facade, all bright smiles with edges that could cut nearly as well as his words that were delivered in the coldest, cheerfully sardonic voice he could muster. This was Dean’s battle armor, and the more he hurt, the thicker it became. Like a callus. Like a scar. He thought it meant Cas couldn’t see the damage he was suffering, when its very presence said more than anything that he was curling around his wounds and lashing out in the most hurtful way he could think of in retaliation. Because like Cas, Dean knew exactly what to say to drive the tiny spines of pain where they twisted the most.

They’d spent so much time learning one another that it was hardly surprising they’d learned the most efficient and brutal ways to hurt each other.

Now, as Cas slammed his duffel onto the bed, they both knew a line had been crossed, some unspoken boundary, a point of no return. Dean’s facade flickered for the barest of moments before hardening again, his eyes like agates. “Here. Let me help.” With crisp, precise movements, he turned and wrenched a drawer from the dresser, dumping its contents atop the duffel. “Let me make it easy. That’s what you want, right? Things to be easy?”

Cas didn’t respond. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to be shoving the clothes into the duffel with ruthless efficiency, ignoring the shower of flannel and cotton as Dean upended another of the drawers over his hands as he worked. But there was a momentum now, like a swinging pendulum, and he couldn’t stop any more than if he’d jumped from a height. He let Dean continue his biting litany, forcing himself to feel every word, every accusation, every dig.

He zipped the duffel with a sense of finality. The sound felt like a seal of permanence, a mousetrap that had snapped and was done. “If you’re trying to call my bluff -” His throat felt sore as he said the words, almost a growl, raw from the shouting they’d done earlier.

“Not bluffing. Go. You’re good at leaving. Do it.”

He should say something. Should grasp at whatever safety lines were left, whatever last bastions he could find that might put them back standing safely on the same side of things, where he could reach out and run a thumb across that freckled cheek and say he was sorry.

Cas shouldered the duffel and stalked from the room.


	13. FICLET: A Hunch

It was chicken pox.

It shouldn’t be so funny. Sam and Dean had both had it when Dean had brought it home from a second grade classmate. Where Cas had managed to scrounge it up was anybody’s guess, but when the general bad flu symptoms erupted into hundreds of tiny itchy rashes, it was difficult to deny what it was.

“Don’t itch at them,” Dean admonished as he plunked a mug of coffee in front of Cas. “You’ll make it worse.”

Cas shot Dean a dirty look and grabbed at the mug. “You can’t use ‘itch’ that way.”

Dean shrugged. “Sure you can. Something’s itchy, you itch it. Except don’t itch it right now.”

Thoroughly frustrated, Cas deliberately raised one hand to scratch at the back of his neck in protest. “This is miserable. How am I supposed to not scratch?”

“I’ll get you mittens,” Dean smirked.

“Should we take him to a doctor?” Sam asked as he slid into a chair at the table with his bowl of Cheerios. “Chicken pox can be really bad in adults.”

“Nah,” Dean replied nonchalantly. “Stick him in an oatmeal bath until he wrinkles and slop some calamine on him.”

Sam raised an eyebrow as he lifted his spoon to his mouth. “You know, there are places where people pay extra for that.”

Dean promptly turned a bright red and buried his face in his mug, but not before glancing at Cas.

Cas, who was still preoccupied with the back of his neck, didn’t notice.

Sam smiled into his Cheerios and took another bite. Well. There was one thing he was right about, at least.


	14. FICLET: Unexpected Lover

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _This one's a random Cas/Other with Destiel overtones. Feel free to skip if it's not your thing._

Cas slowly makes his way across the country to the Winchesters, stopping in hole-in-the-wall diners and truck stops and hostels along the way trying to barter a meal and a shower for an evening of dish-washing or mopping. It’s in the common room of a mostly empty hostel, disinterestedly watching some late-night talk show while trying to turn weariness and fatigue into actual sleepiness, that a man about Dean’s age shyly approaches him and they begin talking.

As Cas gets more and more flustered at what is obviously becoming open flirtation - something he’s never really attempted, let alone mastered, and it shows - the man seems more and more enamored until he finally asks if Cas wants to stay in his room for the night. Four beds, he assures Cas quickly, though the other three are empty tonight.

Cas has already earned his keep for the night, and is tempted to say no, but this is the first person in weeks who hasn’t treated him with thinly - or not-so-thinly - veiled disgust, and the offer of companionship is suddenly more than Cas can even hope to resist. Even knowing full well what the other man has in mind, despite the promise of four beds, he accepts.

The man won’t stop calling Cas beautiful, gorgeous - the praises fall from his lips as though they’re the easiest thing in the world to say, and they feel almost as good as what the man is doing to him, all feather-light touches and pressure and fullness until Cas is overcome and so is his unexpected lover, and they lay gasping in the twisted sheets listening to the bass pumping from the dance club across the street and Cas  _can’t believe he just did that_.

But it was  _so nice_  to feel wanted. 

Morning is marked by bagels, staleness hidden by a quick toasting, with instant oatmeal and bottled orange drink that had likely never seen a tree. The man is bashful once again, and asks if Cas is going to stick around.

With a surprising amount of regret, Cas responds that he has somewhere to get to, and the sad smile in the man’s eyes shows that he expected the response.

The man has a bicycle locked out back, and as he throws one leg over, he looks to Cas in a sort of hopeful farewell. “You’re going to make some guy very happy someday. I hope he’s where you’re headed."

Cas had never thought of it that way, exactly, but as he watches the man cycle off down the empty city street of early morning, he realizes the truth of it.

He shifts his tattered backpack on his shoulder and gets his bearings, then begins walking steadily in the general direction of Kansas.


	15. FICLET: Done, Part II

The lights of the bunker had long since disappeared behind him, and the neglected streetlights of the gravel road stood like tombs for their burned-out bulbs. The darkness suited Cas just fine, though the angry stalk had devolved to something more like a weary trudge as the impact of what had just happened began to dull the edges of his consciousness even more than did the fatigue.

The twin beams of headlights somewhere far behind him cut the night and Cas’s heart leapt sideways in his chest as he turned - but no. The headlights were too high off the ground. Suddenly more tired than he had been before, he turned back around and continued focusing intently on putting one foot in front of the other, shifting his duffel to the other shoulder.

The beat-up pickup truck slowed to a crawl next to him, and Cas could hear the window being rolled down. “Can I give you a lift?”

Cas swallowed hard against the sudden tempest of emotions that swirled in his middle. “No. But thanks.”

“Cas, I can’t just leave you to walk to town on your own. It’ll take all night.”

“Fine by me.” Cas knew Sam wouldn’t give up; he walked a few more steps in protest before sighing and wrenching open the passenger-side door.

The engine rattled. Cas toyed with a frayed hole in the upholstery of the seat. “I’m sorry,” Sam finally ventured as they waited at a stop sign for another car to pass.

Cas nodded, not knowing what to say. “I assume you heard most of it.”

“Yeah.” The truck didn’t behave as Sam tried to shift it into first; the precious seconds it took to coax it into forward motion again gave Cas plenty of time to blink hard against the stinging in his eyes.

They didn’t utter another word until they finally rolled to a stop in the parking lot of the closest motel. The sudden silence as the engine cut out pressed at Cas’s ears like thunder. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” Sam hesitated. “What are you going to do now?”

Cas ran a weary hand over his face. “I don’t know. I guess - but then she’s Dean’s friend, too, and any contact with me might…” he trailed off as reality began to take shape around him. Of course he couldn’t go to Charlie. Nor could he go to Kevin, or even Kevin’s mother. Garth might, perhaps, be a safe neutral party, but other than him…

And Sam. Cas looked to the side and could see in the lines of Sam’s forehead that the same thought had occurred to him, too. “Look,” Sam said awkwardly, studying the steering wheel in front of him, “I’ll talk to him.”

“No.” The word surprised Cas with its forcefulness. “It’ll just make him angrier.”

“Then he can hit me. Cas, you’re - dude, you’re my brother, too. I can’t let that stop just because…”

“Sam,” Cas said softly, “it’s over. It’s been a long time coming. And…” Cas clenched his jaw. This was nearly as hard as walking away from the bunker had been. “You’re still my brother. Or as good as. And maybe someday…”

Sam nodded. “Maybe someday Dean will pull his head out of his ass.” His lips twisted in a wry, sad smile. “You have cash?”

“Enough.” Even if he didn’t, Cas wasn’t going to take money from Sam. He’d made his way before on his wits. He could do it again.

“If you need anything, you call. Promise me.” The offer throbbed with such sincerity that Cas had to swallow.

“I will.” He wouldn’t. They both knew it. Cas didn’t look at Sam as he shoved open the door and stepped down from the truck.

He did have enough cash, for at least the one night’s stay; the room forcibly reminded him of the dozens of others just like it they’d stayed in over the years, with its hideous duvet and clanking air conditioner under the window. He lowered himself to the edge of the bed and mechanically removed his shoes and socks, lowering himself deeper and deeper into that numb state he’d managed to find before with the rhythm of his walking.

The air conditioning clanked to life just before he drifted off to sleep, waking him for just a moment. Absently he turned to his other side to throw an arm over -

_Oh._


	16. FICLET: Done, Part III

Days passed, as days are wont to do, and Cas was surprised that they did not drag as he had assumed they would. Rather, they lurched by in odd dollops of time, and it was with puzzlement that he looked up from the bucket of dirty mop water early one evening to realize that five weeks had passed, and that he had not thought about Dean at all today.

He should start thinking about getting a place of his own. The hostel was in some ways cheaper than rent, but saturated him with the feel of temporariness, as though he were holding his breath.

Even if it hurt, he had to start breathing again.

In the stuttered motions of someone still learning the patterns of something new, he stowed his cleaning cart in the utility closet in the hallway, nodding farewell to the surgeons and nurses as they passed him. They liked him here. He was thorough - always a good thing for a man who cleaned operating rooms to be - and he was quiet. No one seemed to look down on him, either, which was…refreshing.

And there was a girl. Not that he had any interest in her - she was a good ten years younger than his supposed age - but she did in him, and that was intriguing. She smiled at him as he swiped his badge to get into the locker room, and he found himself smiling shyly back. He shouldn't encourage her. He didn't want to be the reason she ever stopped smiling.

He pulled on his street clothes with a distracted air, tossing that day's green scrubs into the laundry hamper on his way out. He had a day off tomorrow. He could spend the time looking for a place to live. The thought somehow cheered him, so much so that it was difficult to believe that the same thought had caused him such despair not even a month ago.

"I guess a lot can happen in a month," he said to himself as he pushed open the door to the stairwell. He'd taken to doing that - talking to himself. It would often be the only words he would speak on days he didn't work - narrating his morning cup of coffee, musing about the differences between whole wheat and nine-grain bagels. He worried slightly that he was going insane; he finally settled on the theory that he was just lonely. Just wanted someone to talk to, even if that someone was himself.

It was dark outside; the city had not yet gotten around to fixing the streetlight outside the often-ignored side entrance to the hospital, and the trees on either side of the street blocked the orange glow of the other lights. Cas pushed open the door and stepped out - and then halted, his breath freezing in his chest almost painfully.

Dean uncrossed his arms and pushed himself away from the post of the burned-out streetlight he'd been leaning against. He looked just the same as he always had, and somehow wildly out of place as he thrust himself into the haven of normalcy Cas had tried so hard to collect around himself.

Swallowing, his Adam's apple bobbing, Dean took a step forward. "Hey."


	17. FICLET: Back Here

Cas looked thoroughly miserable; he ran his hand through his hair, standing it up on end, mouth forming shapes but no words coming out, explanation beyond him as Dean stood silently seething. “A trucker turned me on to them," he said finally, a pleading note in his voice. “When I was hitchhiking. I…didn’t like sleeping, those first few weeks. I still don’t."

"Then drink coffee," Dean said flatly, brandishing the bottle of pills. “Chug an energy drink. I’m not -  _we’re_  not going to end up like this. Do you hear me? We’re not ending up there!"

Puzzled, Cas opened his mouth, but Dean turned away, hurling the bottle at the trash can by the door. It missed; the bottle rattled as it rolled across the floor. He’d flush them later.

They were not going to end up back there. So far Lucifer was only showing up to Sam in dreams. He’d hopefully turned Cas off the amphetamines early.  _They were not going to end up back there._

There was the lightest touch on his shoulder. “Dean. I’m sorry."

Dean didn’t want to turn. Cas was wearing the damn blue shirt. He hadn’t been able to put his finger on it until he’d found the bottle in Cas’s duffel instead of the toothpaste he’d been looking for, but he was wearing the damn shirt. Cities were falling into drastic quarantine measures. And Lucifer was offering to free Sam from the illness the Trials had drowned him in.

"Something’s wrong."

"Everything’s wrong." Dean turned to face Cas, impulsively wrapping his arms around the fallen’s angel and resting his chin on one shoulder. “And I can’t stop it."

_No matter what choices you make, whatever details you alter, we will always end up…here._

He’d always defied those words. Now he wondered if defiance was, in fact, denial, and there was no other place they could end up.


	18. FICLET: Done, Part IV

Dean surprised him further by unlocking the door to the back seat of the Impala and sliding in, beckoning Cas to follow. Numerous flashes of symbolism flitted through Cas’s mind - Dean surrendering the control of the driver’s seat, the willingness to stay put until the conversation was done - as he shut the door firmly behind him, muffling the sounds of the city night outside.

The silence felt thick enough for Cas to reach out and knead, shape into something more palatable. He swallowed. “You look good."

"I guess." Dean was focused on his hands, folded loosely in his lap.

Cas nodded slowly. He wanted to ask what Dean was doing here. Why he’d seen it as necessary to come and bring Cas’s carefully constructed world crashing back down around him. He was suddenly suffused with a subtle anger, sharper than simple frustration, and he resolved to not say a word until Dean started the dialogue he clearly wanted so desperately.

It seemed as though they might be there all night. Dean was studying his hands as though they contained the answer to the universe’s mysteries. Cas waited.

"I was stupid," Dean said finally. “You called me out, and I was a bitch about it. I’m sorry.”

It was, perhaps, a gross oversimplification of the three-hour shouting match they’d had, but it was a start. Cas swallowed. “Okay.”

Dean looked up from his hands. “’Okay?’ That’s it?”

“What do you want, Dean?” They should be anywhere but here. He couldn’t pace here. There was too much tension building for this tiny space to handle. “You said something that I agreed with. So I agreed with you.”

“What do I want?” Dean unfolded his hands and made as though to reach across, but stopped, resting his hand on the seat between them. His brow dipped and in that slight movement Cas could fully see just how much Dean was trying to hold back. “I want you to come home. Please.”

The look of desperation in Dean’s eyes was too intense for Cas to look at for more than a few seconds. He turned his face away, looking out the window at the bushes before he glanced back. “You think you can come apologize, and then we’ll go driving off into the sunset like nothing ever happened?”

Cas hated the tiny flinch that flashed across Dean’s face. He hated that he’d caused it. “I - look, I know you’re still mad, and you’ve got every right to be -”

“You think I stayed away because I was angry?” The words were bubbling to the surface now, miasmas of sickly guilt and sorrow and frustration. “I  _left_ because I was angry. I stayed away because - ‘cause there was no point in going back.”

“There is,” Dean began, but Cas shook his head violently.

“There isn’t,” he said firmly. “Everything we fought about - those problems are still there, don’t you see? Apologizing for them doesn’t make them go away. Or do you really think we broke up because we hadn’t been trying hard enough?”

“Yes!” Dean said forcefully, turning in the seat to face Cas, eyes pleading. “I wasn’t! I always took for granted that you were, because I - I always took  _you_ for granted. I took advantage of everything you ever did for me - and you called me on it and I didn’t want to hear it and…” He brought himself up short, the words threatening to break down his wall of self-control as they tumbled out faster. “I even took for granted that you’d come back, because you always have before,” he said in a low voice. “And that’s the problem. It’s me. I wasn’t trying. I never did. But I want to.” He took a great, shaky breath. “Cas, I thought I didn’t know what love was until I had you. I was dead wrong. I didn’t know what love was until I didn’t have you anymore. And I can’t sleep knowing it was my fault I lost you.”

Swallowing against the tightness in his chest, Cas dared to look up from his lap, touching eyes with Dean in a tentative, hesitant glance. Pain twisted in his middle, just as he’d known it would: Dean always wore every emotion so plainly on his face that it was impossible to not feel as he felt.

Dean set his jaw and reached out to take Cas’s hand. Cas let him. “I need you. Always have. Please. I want to try again. And I’ll try, this time. I swear it.”

Dean’s hand felt so warm on his, the curves of it fitting exactly to his own. Cas could feel the pulse in it, feel his pulse changing pace to match it. He closed his eyes. “Can I ask for one thing?”

“Anything.”

“Space. To think. For as long as I need.”


	19. FICLET: Gestures

They weren’t much ones for public displays of affection, but Sam knew all the tiny gestures.

Cas sometimes wore Dean’s shirts. Not in the patchwork motley sort of way he’d worn both Dean and Sam’s things in the first weeks after they’d found him after the Fall, but with a quiet pride. He held himself differently when he wore Dean’s shirts, as though he was more aware of the fabric against his skin, of the very visible symbol he was displaying by wearing them. Sam wasn’t sure whether Dean noticed the subtle change in Cas’s demeanor, or if Dean just liked to look at Cas wearing his clothes, but Sam definitely noticed the way Dean’s eyes lingered on the fallen angel on the occasions that Cas opted to dress himself from Dean’s duffel rather than his own.

The pattern of the beer was something Sam was rather proud of himself for figuring out - the beer cycled, depending on who had done the grocery run that week: when Cas had done the shopping, it would be Dean’s favorite amber in the fridge, but when Dean shopped, it was Cas’s lager of choice.

When Dean drove, Cas got shotgun. If you didn’t know Dean, you didn’t know the kind of importance Dean placed in who got to sit next to him as the miles rolled away under the tires. But Sam knew Dean, and had been in that seat for years; that Cas had usurped him wasn’t cause for jealousy at all. (There was, surprisingly, more room for Sam to stretch out when he had the backseat to himself.) Instead, it was cause for a silent celebration that his brother had finally begun to venture outside the narrow, self-imposed definition of himself that wound so tightly around Sam. He worried about that occasionally; worried that Dean wouldn’t know what to do with himself if Sam was gone. But with Cas in the front seat, he worried a little less.

And when Dean’s hand was not on the gear shift, it rested lightly upon Cas’s knee - another small gesture that was impossible to miss. Sometimes Cas would reach out and lay his hand on top of Dean’s. They didn’t give each other lingering, sappy looks when they touched like that; it was almost as though Dean was confirming to himself that Cas was still there, and Cas was reassuring Dean that yes, he was. Would always be. If they were on a long stretch of highway they’d stay like that for hours, until Dean had to downshift and he moved - but his hand always returned.

Sam couldn’t point to any one thing and say “look, they’re in love.” But he also couldn’t point at any one raindrop and say “look, it’s raining.” It was true nevertheless.


	20. FICLET: Already Knew

He doesn’t know what to do.

Dean’s breathing - or a machine is breathing for him, one of the two - and he looks so peaceful but it’s all an illusion, a trick of the clear bags and their tubes and the needles. Cas didn’t know how much he hated needles until he saw how many had been involved in settling Dean into this bed.

Sam is there, and Charlie, and Charlie had spent some time holding Cas as tears numbly ran down his face and soaked the shoulder of her shirt and he’d felt that she understood, somehow. Sam stares at Dean on the bed as though unable to believe that it’s real.

There are peaks and valleys and numbers and colors on the screens at the head of Dean’s bed. Cas doesn’t know what they mean. He can name every major vessel, enumerate every muscle in the human body in alphabetical order in seven languages, but this knowledge seems far removed from the almost ritualistic actions the doctors are taking as they stand with their grim faces around Dean’s bed.

And Cas is useless, worse than useless, because there was a time when he could have done something. Mended the contusions, stemmed the slow bleed whose source baffled the doctors, done something. His hands now were good for nothing but stroking the rough stubble of his cheeks.

"I never told him," he says to Sam one morning as they pick at the tasteless hospital food.

"He knew," Sam says, looking up. “I know he did."

"I might never get to tell him now. He might never hear it from me."

Sam takes a long swallow from his orange juice. “Dean’s tough. He’ll pull through."

They’ve been saying that and variations of that for days; any improvement is too small for anyone to tell.

Cas is alone in the room with the hum of the machines and the steady beeps that he’s learned to tune out, and Dean looks so small and shrunken and Cas is overwhelmed by everything he should have said and could have done and wanted to do and he can’t stop himself from leaning over the bed and pressing his lips to Dean’s forehead, knowing the gesture is useless but beyond caring.

A monitor blips. It is a different blip, and it takes a moment before Cas realizes that Dean’s eyelids are fluttering.

This has happened before, as he slowly rises from the enforced sedation the doctors are keeping him under; any second now a nurse will appear and change the IV bag and Dean will drift off to wherever he has been spending his time.

And there she is, the night nurse, the one called Felicity who has brought Cas coffee. She gives him a sad smile and goes to change the IV bag.

But Cas’s eyes are drawn to a slow twitch in Dean’s hand that lays on the outside of the covers. The fingers spasm, then curl in on themselves, and…

The room blurs, and Cas wipes his eyes. Dean’s unmistakable thumbs-up relaxes as the sedative washes over him again.

Cas would be able to tell him. Even if he already knew.


	21. FICLET: Done, Part V

The sheets were clammy where they touched Cas, wicking away the fine sheen of sweat that stood on his skin in the afterglow. Groggily, he peered through half-open eyes at Dean next to him, and was rewarded with a lazy smile and an arm thrown across his shoulders.

This was the opposite of space.

But despite all his best intentions, Cas had not been able to help himself; he’d felt all resolve melt away as Dean had wrapped him in a hopeless farewell embrace and he’d leaned into the touch, the arms that were so familiar that he could hardly tell where he stopped and Dean began. He’d curled his fingers in the folds of Dean’s jacket when Dean tried to step back, not wanting it to end, not wanting it to ever end -

The kiss had been entirely his fault, soft and languid at first and then gaining heat - and it was so easy. It was like it always had been. The weeks and miles and furious words had disappeared like a pricked soap bubble and Cas could feel tears beginning to pool beneath his eyelids as he clutched Dean to him, a drowning man grasping his only lifeline.

They hadn’t said a word - at least not a coherent word - since Dean had gruffly whispered “stay with me tonight?" and Cas had nodded, not caring what it meant. Not caring that it might hurt them both later. He ached for it - not for the sex itself, but for the intimacy, the intertwined limbs and the absolute knowledge that he was safe and warm and loved.

There was no denying that here - there was no room for anything else in that honey-warm gaze Dean was directing towards him between barely-parted lashes. Cas felt saturated in it. He never wanted to leave this again.

But…

Dean must have detected some sort of change - the cadence of Cas’s breathing, or the stiffening of his shoulders, or hardening in his eyes. “No," he said, almost pleading, “Cas, I…"

"This was - not a mistake. Never a mistake, Dean, never. But…"

"Cas, we’re so close."

"That’s what scares me." Regret a heavy weight in his chest, Cas sat up, leaning against the headboard of the bed. “This is how it started. So intense and perfect and we didn’t know how to say no to it. And we just jumped, without checking how deep the water was first, and…" He closed his eyes, running his hands over his face. “We can’t do that again. This is fragile. We can’t just - love is all well and good. But we need a foundation. We can’t just build a house on sand and expect it to hold."

"You’re not coming home, are you?"

Cas uncovered his eyes and locked his gaze with Dean's. “Not yet. I - we - need to…I can’t do this again. It would tear us apart."

Dean nodded solemnly. “We do it right, then? Slow and steady?"

"Slow and steady."

Slow and steady.

Slow and steady lead them clumsily through the next month; Dean would drive out from the bunker and meet Cas at the hospital at the end of his shift; they would go out for a beer and often end up falling asleep in the backseat of the Impala, barely-clothed and content to the marrow of their bones.

Slow and steady threaded the days along its cord like beads; Dean got his own dresser drawer in Cas’s tiny apartment barely worthy of the name, and the beaming smile that widened across Dean’s face when Cas shyly presented it to him lit up the entire room.

Slow and steady was punctuated by days and weeks when Dean was off hunting; the bed was not empty, because Cas had learned to sleep alone, but it was waiting. Patiently.

Slow and steady saw flowers thrust cheekily at one another, pretending the sentiment was a joke but treasuring every moment; it saw them both alone, but not lonely. It saw Cas smiling more and Dean smiling more and Cas introducing Dean to his coworkers at a picnic.

And, when the time was right, slow and steady led to Cas loading as many of his possessions as he could into boxes, and Dean cleaning out his dresser drawer, and Cas giving his keys back to the landlord.

"You sure about this?" Dean asked, stopping before turning right onto the gravel road that led to the bunker. “I don’t want - are we ready for this?" He swallowed. “Can we do this without fucking it up again?"

Cas reached over and laid a hand on Dean’s knee. “Let’s find out."

Dean nodded, and turned the wheel of the Impala towards home.


	22. FICLET: Stop Staring

_too hot to sleep_

_is Dean awake_

_no_

_get up walk around_

_water_

_old pipes make a lot of noise_

_did that wake Dean up_

_yet if I were to draw a knife he'd be awake in an instant_

_and I'd probably be dead_

_doesn't even look peaceful when he's asleep_

_what is he dreaming_

_he looks worried_

_shouldn't be staring_

_why am I staring_

_I don't stare at Sam like this_

_water_

_it's quiet tonight_

_too hot for anything to bother making noise_

_cold shower might help_

_too noisy_

_why am I staring at him again_

_like watching him breathe will keep him doing it_

_would he wake up if I touched him_

_just his cheek_

_probably_

_how can he stand being under that sheet fully clothed_

_stop staring_

_glass is empty_

_cold tile bare feet_

_could sleep in here_

_why do I stare at him_

_he doesn't stare at me_

_not like that_

_do I want him to_

_tile uncomfortable_

_bed, pillow just so_

_can't see him from here_

_why does that matter_

_too hot to sleep_

_too hard to sleep with him so close so far away_

_always so far away_

_Dean_

_let me be close_

_please_


	23. FICLET: Before Dawn

Dean used to be a deep sleeper. He didn’t know when that had changed — probably in Purgatory, if he really thought about it — but it didn’t take much to jerk him awake anymore.

It was a motel room much like any other, with light slanting through the gap in the blackout curtain and the too-bright green LED on the smoke alarm stabbing his eyes after the darkness behind his eyelids. Blinking hard, Dean pushed himself up on one elbow, casting sleep-heavy eyes about the room to discover what had awoken him, if it was a threat, and if it was, if he had time to pee first.

Everything seemed to be in order at first glance, but then the dark shape caught at the corner of his eye and he sat up completely in alarm before the recognition circuits kicked in.

“Cas?” he asked, his voice low and groggy.

“I’m fine.” Cas’s voice, on the other hand, was merely quiet, barely enough to carry across the narrow space between Dean’s queen-size bed and Cas’s rollaway. The dark shape shifted in a movement much like someone hugging their knees more tightly to their chest, and the rollaway bed creaked in response. “Go back to sleep.”

Not a threat. Time to pee.

Mind marginally clearer after his sojourn to the bathroom, Dean paused as he pulled aside his covers. Cas was still sitting up, forehead pressed against his knees, absolutely still and silent. The sheet and cheap velour blanket had come untucked from the bottom of the rollaway bed - possibly because, even as the shortest of the three of them, Cas was slightly too tall for the bed. Or maybe because he’d been thrashing in his sleep. Or some combination of the two.

Dean could hear Cas taking a slow, deep breath. Very controlled. The breath of someone trying desperately to calm down, to slow a racing heart, to calm the clamoring tumult that adrenaline had made of their body.

He had already rounded the bottom of his bed before Dean realized that he was moving. The rollaway tilted alarmingly as Dean lowered himself onto it, and Cas’s shoulders twitched in surprise, though he didn’t raise his head.

“Nightmare?” Dean asked softly.

Cas nodded, not lifting his forehead from his knees.

Hesitantly, Dean raised his hand and placed it on Cas’s back. It seemed like the thing to do, even if Dean wasn’t sure why. Cas flinched away from the touch at first before leaning into it, warm pressure against Dean’s hand that rose and lowered with Cas’s breathing.

He could have said anything.  _I feel you, man_ _._  Or,  _that sucks_. Or he could have ventured into dangerous chick-flick territory with  _tell me about it_.

He didn’t. The need to break the silence burned the roof of his mouth, but he kept it shut. His outstretched arm began to ache, but he didn’t move it, just kept resting his hand lightly against Cas’s back.

It was Cas who spoke first, rolling his shoulders back as he unclenched his hands from around his shins, stretching his legs. “Thank you.”

Dean could feel the muscles coiling beneath Cas’s skin, the shoulder blades sliding. He didn’t want to move his hand. He made a fist and punched Cas’s shoulder gently before standing, his palm still warm, fingers curled against it as though to save the warmth for something later.

His own sheets still held some of his body heat as he slid between them, but even after punching his pillow into a more satisfying shape, he lay awake for a long time, until he heard Cas’s breathing grow slow and regular. Only then did his eyelids grow heavy and his hand uncurl, the feel of Cas’s back against his palm escaping into the silent moments before dawn.


	24. SHORT: Arm's Length

They’d been fighting again.

It wasn’t exactly the atmosphere that tipped Sam off. It was the things that were missing. He’d had to glance around the kitchen several times before he could fathom what felt strange, and it wasn’t until his eyes landed on the coffeemaker for the fourth time that it struck him.

It was off. Cold, dead, the red light of its power switch dormant.

That was when Sam knew that if he ventured into the library, he’d find Cas sprawled on the old couch, dead to the world. The alarm that normally woke him had probably been angrily silenced by Dean an hour ago, still in the bedroom they shared.

After a moment of careful consideration, Sam reached into a cabinet for the bag of coffee grounds.

He’d been half-right; Cas was on the couch, but he wasn’t sprawled. Sam debated with himself as he pondered how small Cas looked, curled up around one of the beat-up throw pillows like that, eyelids fluttering, brows terse and furrowed even in sleep. Finally, he cleared his throat loudly, and Cas’s eyes popped open.

“Coffee?” Sam asked, holding up the mug.

Cas blinked blearily, unfurling himself from around the pillow he’d been clutching and sitting up. “What time is it?” he asked, raking his hands through his hair.

“About eight.” Sam glanced in the direction of the stairwell. “Dean’s not awake yet.”

“Mmm.” Cas nodded, the faintest cast of bitterness around his pursed lips as he reached out to take the proffered mug of coffee.

Sam watched him take a few sips before letting out a whooshing exhalation. “So. Is this a ‘nose in’ sort of thing or a ‘get out of our business, Sam’ thing?”

“I don’t know.” Cas sighed heavily. “Both? Neither?” He stared into his mug at the coffee, shifting to the side as Sam sat down next to him. “I’m used to his - his moods. I should know better than to try and press the issue when he…” He huffed a breath that could have been a self-mocking laugh. “But then if I drop it he thinks I don’t care anymore. And so he goads me into saying things that are way harsher than I actually feel, and…” He glanced wryly at Sam. “And you’ve seen me when he gets my hackles up.”

Sam nodded. “So this is just him in douche-mode, then?”

“Oh, no.” Cas took a hasty sip from his mug, looking abruptly abashed. “No, this is - this one was my fault.” He let his eyes drift into the middle distance as he directed his gaze back into the coffee. “Didn’t feel like it last night, but…I see it now. Where it started.”

Sam nodded again. Cas was like Dean in a lot of ways; it was usually better to just let them both talk out whatever was eating at them.

“I just…is it so hard for him to say?” Cas looked up, eyes plaintive. “Is it so hard for him to hear?”

“Yeah,” Sam said simply, when it was clear that Cas was looking for an answer. “Cas, everyone he’s ever let closer than arm’s length…something’s happened to them. You and me, we’re closer than he’s let anyone, and that probably scares him shitless.”

“So this happens to you, too?” Cas asked softly.

“Little bit different. I get to stay in my own bed.” Cas snorted at that, and Sam let a small smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “But yeah. Every couple of months, he does his weird distancing thing. Like he’s trying to prove to himself that he doesn’t need me.” Sam wished he had a mug of coffee, as well, or at least something to occupy his hands. “He’s so tied up in me - and in you, now, too, even if he won’t admit it - that if something were to happen to either of us…I think he’d shut down. I really do.”

“And so we put up with this.” Cas leaned back to get the last swallow of coffee.

“We love him.” Sam shrugged. “He knows it. He has trouble believing it, sometimes.” He looked sidelong at Cas. “I have trouble believing that you’ll put up with his crap sometimes, too. I have to. He’s my brother. But you  _chose_  this.”

“I’d choose it again, too.” Cas toyed with the mug in his hands, rolling it between them. “Lumpy couches and all.”

Sam stood as Cas did, holding a hand out to take the empty mug. Cas placed it carefully into Sam’s hand, looking gravely into Sam’s face.

“Thank you,” he said, and Sam knew it wasn’t just for the coffee.

“Anytime.”

Cas took a deep breath and looked toward the stairwell. “I’ve got some harsh words to go apologize for. Don’t hold breakfast.” He shot a smirk at Sam. “Or probably lunch, for that matter.”

Sam lowered his face into his palm as Cas raised a suggestive eyebrow. “Cas, just - don’t. That’s a dollar into the Yuck jar.”

He watched as Cas disappeared around the corner, passing the empty mug from one hand to the other. It wouldn’t be as easy as Cas was playing at - it never was - but Sam knew just how deeply Dean’s affections toward the fallen angel ran. In a few days, between Sam’s companionship and Cas’s rather more specialized attentions, Dean would slowly come back to his normal operating levels.

He had some very good people taking care of him. And one day, he might even accept that.


	25. FICLET: Later

It’s wildly inappropriate right now but they’re tense and crouched in the alcove, every sense twisted to a hair trigger, and Cas can  _feel_  the heat radiating off Dean’s neck, and he can smell the combination of cheap motel shampoo and soap and leather and whiskey and sweat and gunpowder, and even though their guns are drawn and they’re barely breathing as they listen for footfalls, Cas can’t ignore it any more than he could a gut wound.

The echoes of the footfalls are growing fainter and Dean’s shoulders visibly relax and Cas takes his chance, dips his head the few inches it takes to press his lips to the bare skin at the juncture of Dean’s neck and shoulder, and he has the fleeting impression of salt before Dean jerks away as though he’s been burned.

"What the hell, Cas?" he demands in a hoarse whisper, his full height towering over Cas as he crouches, the weight of what he’s just done bowing his head in something close to shame.

There’s a grip on his shoulder, inexorably pulling him up to standing, and Cas doesn’t fight it, though he keeps his eyes fixed firmly on his shoes. But then there is a finger under his chin, pulling it up, and Cas locks eyes with Dean, whose expression is far from the angry accusation he’d uttered moments before.

The footfalls sound again, in the distance; Dean’s eyes flicker as he glanced in their direction before returning to Cas.

"Later," he says gruffly. He reaches up and, in a gesture that makes Cas’s heart step sideways in his chest, rakes his hand through Cas’s tousled locks in an unmistakably intimate touch before he’s headed down the stone corridor, trusting Cas to follow. 


	26. FICLET: The Sky Shudders

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the full effect of this ficlet, [please see its video here. Fullscreen and sound recommended.](http://youtu.be/fX8o4hk9ThQ)

There was no thunder.

The clouds simply opened, rain pouring from them in bright silver sheets that splashed against the pavement beneath their feet with loud sighs.

Dean let out a shout, grabbing Castiel by the arm in an effort to make the other man move just a little bit faster. Their shoulders were already glistening with a wet sheen of rain, their hair catching droplets and darkening.

The car was still warm inside. The rain pounded on the roof in a dulled staccato as Castiel looked over and caught Dean's eye.

Abruptly, smiles crept across their faces, and a deep, rolling laugh swelled up and out of Dean's belly. To Dean's surprise, Castiel began to chuckle as well, a warm, throaty sound that plucked at something deep beneath Dean's ribs.

It thrummed, resonating with the wrinkles at the edges of Castiel's eyes, and as it percolated through Dean's consciousness some tiny and subtle threshold snapped within him.

Slow and ponderous, as though moving underwater, Dean reached across the space between them to cup Castiel's rough cheek in his hand. Castiel's grin melted away, replaced by dawning awe as Dean pulled him close.

The first brush of lips was barely a touch at all, hesitant and timid as it was, Dean's thumb trailing along Castiel's cheekbone more firmly than they pressed their lips against one another's. Castiel leaned into Dean's touch, so slightly it might have been Dean's imagination, and reached up to lay a hand at the back of Dean's neck in a gentle caress that sent a warm prickle radiating across Dean's shoulders.

Castiel's lips instinctively parted slightly in response to Dean's, and the kiss deepened with slowly growing abandon as, within it, Dean discovered everything that had filled the silent gazes between them, all the minute and sundry ways in which they belonged here. Castiel responded in kind, threading his fingers through the bedraggled, damp hair at the nape of Dean's neck, his other hand now resting on Dean's knee, fingers curling slightly against the fabric in idle patterns.

Above them, the sky shuddered and the rainfall ceased its relentless barrage against the roof of the car. Water danced in rivulets across the windshield as Dean pulled back and opened his eyes to look into Castiel's, both of them dazed and breathless, minds humming with the potential of what they'd just set free.


	27. FICLET: While We Wait

“Fuck. Cas.  _Cas_.” Dean closed his eyes and canted his head back against the seat, threading his fingers through Cas’s hair and tugging. “ _Hurry_.”

Cas made an amused sound, the vibration of it sending tiny thrills of pleasure up Dean’s cock, and Dean had to grit his teeth and swallow hard to try and keep some semblance of a neutral expression on his face for the benefit of the infrequent passers-by of the grocery store parking lot. Of course, all it would take would be one glance at the correct angle for them to see Cas bent double in his seat over Dean’s lap, fingers of one hand curled around the steering wheel for leverage, and it would become very quickly apparent as to what was currently unfolding in the front seat of the car.

Breathtakingly close to the edge, Dean was finding it very difficult to care at the moment. Entire body tense, resisting thrusting up into Cas’s mouth with every shred of self-control he had, Dean opened his eyes and his breath left him in a tense moan. “Cas, I can see him.”

In wordless answer, Cas wrapped his fingers around the base of Dean’s cock and stroked, tongue still lapping around and over the head, and the new sensation combined with the shot of adrenaline at being discovered like this finally snapped the tension in Dean’s belly. Sharp pulses, almost painful in their intensity, made him shudder as Cas sucked hard, careful to not let a single drop escape as Dean’s orgasm crested and waned.

And then, in a flurry of movement, Cas straightened in his seat, Dean shoved his softening cock back into his jeans and zipped the fly, and Cas arranged his sweatshirt in his lap to hide his tented khakis. Not five seconds later, Sam yanked open the back door to the car.

“Neither of them has true aerial advantage,” Cas said, very seriously, as Sam slid into the backseat. “They’re both too dependent upon surrounding manmade structures, and mostly have to begin at a height to make any use of their abilities.”

“Seriously?” Sam asked, the plastic bags he carried rustling as he arranged them in the seat next to him. “Batman versus Spiderman again?”

“Yeah, well,” Dean said, shifting the car into drive, “we have to do something while we wait.”


	28. FICLET: For What it's Worth

He looks down at his hands, flexing them, watching the ripples beneath the skin. Not his hands anymore, technically - his vessel’s hands, once again, tendon and bone and muscle cobbled together in an organic machination of simple, brilliant complexity. But they’d been his, for a while. He’d made them move not by the intervention of divine will, but through the firing of synapses in response to clouds of interacting neurotransmitters, released in feedback loops all in accordance to a conscious decision that, he knew, was a still more complicated soup of amino acids bumping against one another.

But humanity hadn’t seemed so…clinical…when he had been living and breathing it.

He takes a breath now, not because he needs to, but because it is a stabilizing mannerism he’d picked up during the past several weeks. He ponders the oxygen as it filters through his vessel’s body. The heart still beats, the blood still flows, but he is both aware and unaware of it in a new way now, detached from it as he was detached from the clothing he wore.

He closes his eyes. This is him, not the distressingly fragile shape that had encompassed him. This, this beacon of celestial intent, this being that did not have to rely upon chemical reactions to come to a conclusion or resort to the laws of physics to best an opponent. This is him.

He needs to call Dean. Dean needs to know that Sam is not possessed by the angel they knew, that all of them were in danger.

Oddly, the prospect of calling Dean gives him pause. He remembers, vaguely, the thrill that he once felt, the anticipation. He remembers the shock that shot straight through to his fingertips when he looked up to see Dean standing before him, all shy, cocky smiles and carefully rehearsed witticisms. There is none of that there, now, no racing heart or shortness of breath, just an unerring sense of duty - and a vague sense of regret that he had never had a chance to decipher what it had meant.

Emotions. He would miss them. The lust, the pain, the hunger - those were all things he could do without. But the already fading sensation of the twist in his stomach at Dean’s crooked smile…

Castiel picks up the payphone from its cradle and dials the number he knows so well. There is a war unfolding around them, and he is an angel again.

For what it’s worth.


	29. FICLET: Cursed

Sam was either cursed, or they were doing it on purpose. Really, both options seemed equally likely.

Granted, given the communal nature of the shower room, it was only a matter of time before he walked in to see two lily-white asses in the same stall, and he’d performed an abrupt about-face and left even before what he would never be able to unsee registered in his mind. And considering how much Dean loved his car, Sam was surprised he hadn’t interrupted Dean and Cas Adult Cuddle Hour: Impala Edition sooner.

But the library? The storage room? The  _kitchen_? Sam was rapidly running out of surfaces he’d never be able to touch again, and before long he suspected he’d have to learn how to hover.

But when Dean grinned instead of grunted in response to a sarcastic observation Sam made, or he ordered straight Coke with no Jack, or he leaned against Cas’s shoulder with a tired smile, Sam was hard-pressed to say that the price was too dear for seeing his brother finally happy.

Hovering, though. He really had to get on that.


	30. DRABBLE: Just Enough

It was just holding, just his arms around Cas and drawing him close, bodies warm against one another. Just a press of lips against foreheads, just a murmur of content at the way Cas’s fingers lazily traced shapeless patterns in the short hairs on the back of Dean’s neck. Just a moment suspended in the liquid darkness, just senses tuned to a fever pitch, yet sated and fulfilled with the intimate closeness that was not sex and would never be sex but was just two bodies tangled together.

There was nothing “just” about it, nothing “only” or “lacking.” It was just…enough.


	31. FICLET: Piecemeal

Time… _slid_.

It was everywhere at once, words jumbled and happening in no order, faces that couldn’t possibly be there hovering before his bleary eyes.

He coughed once, weakly, and the starbursts behind his eyes at the hot smear in his chest turned it into a cry, more a piteous bleat than anything, and he dipped once more below awareness and drifted.

Words rattled at him, absorbed only because of the voice that spoke them, and they swirled about in his mind until he finally managed to put them in the correct order: “Not all at once. Not my Grace. But piecemeal…”

He was cold, too cold to shiver, a heavy weight on his chest as he struggled to take a breath. A coldness on his forehead. colder than anything he’d felt.

“Dean.”

Like a pricked bubble, everything fell away, as though he’d been lifted to a great height all at once with no notion of being moved. Dean blinked and took a deep breath, ignoring the stabbing in his chest as he did. Weariness that trembled deep as his marrow kept him from struggling to sit up, made it impossible to do anything but focus on the next breath, and then the next.

“Good.” So much relief in that one word, it was near palpable; the word and the voice that spoke it were a salve and Dean let his eyelids flutter back closed against the bright blur of vision.

There was a bed when Dean next opened his eyes: crisp white linen, a flat pillow beneath his head. The smells that had surrounded him, of old leather and the tangy metallic scent of blood, were nothing but a wispy memory. He coughed and shifted.

“Hey. No, don’t move. Not yet.” Pressure on his shoulders, a hand against his forehead.

He licked his lips. “Cas.”

“I’m here. Rest. Give me a few more hours and I’ll try again.” A pause. “Do you hurt?”

Dean considered it. Yes, but he couldn’t seem to make himself care. He tried to say so, but as he puzzled over how to make the words, his eyes closed and something like sleep bore him under.

A deep, pulsing ache battered against him until he finally opened his eyes again; the white linens were clammy, the room too bright, Cas’s words slurred on the edge of panic: “I know. I’m sorry, Dean. This is the best I can do for now. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Just hold on.” The pain in his hand was different; as Dean set his jaw to forebear another moment, and then another, and then another, he realized that his hand hurt because Cas was holding it in both of his as he sat by the bedside, gripping it tightly as he slowly rocked back and forth, mumbling his litany of sorrow.

Years, minutes, days passed in the eternities between heartbeats before the pain receded like the afterimage of a blinding flash. Dean gasped, and the force of the indrawn breath stirred no sharp stab. He pushed himself up to sit with his back against the wall, head pounding with the effort, and as his eyes focused his stomach gave a lurch at the sight of Cas half-collapsed over him, still kneeling next to the bed.

But before Dean could do anything, Cas stirred — at the movement? At the sound? — and rose shakily, rocking back onto his heels as he steadied himself on the edge of the bed. “Hello, Dean,” he said in a voice that sounded every bit as exhausted as Dean felt.

“Cas, I —” Dean’s tongue felt thick and clumsy, and he tried to swallow; the motion felt as though it were something he hadn’t done in several years.

“I couldn’t save the car. You’ll have to rebuild it.” Cas looked down at his hands, curled into fists against the bedspread. “I had to rebuild most of you.”

Dean’s mind shied away — he didn’t want to think, didn’t want to remember — but Cas continued. “I heard you. You prayed to me, just before you…”

“Don’t,” Dean croaked.

Cas looked up, eyes softening as they looked into Dean’s. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I should have seen. I should have stayed.”

Dean closed his eyes, dizzied. “Not your fault.”

“It is.” Cas stood, only to lower himself to sit on the edge of the bed. “Who else could it fall on?” His eyes fell to study the carpet of the motel room. “You’ll heal. I’ll recharge the little power I have.” He took a breath. “And then? We’ll avenge our fallen, you and I. As it should have been from the start.”

“Before I chased you away.” So many words at once; the effort was astonishingly draining.

“Before I left.” Cas reached up and laid a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “It won’t happen again.”

_Good_ _,_  Dean tried to say as he slid back down under the sheets.  _Because I don’t have anyone else anymore._

Sleep was no longer an escape, but a promise: when next he woke, there would be hell to pay.


	32. FICLET: Carpe Diem

“I’ve never understood the premise of Valentine’s Day,” Cas said musingly as he flipped through the advertisement section of the newspaper.

Dean shrugged. “It’s a day to be lovey-dovey and eat chocolate and get laid.”

“But can’t you do that any day of the year?” Cas pressed. “Why select a specific day for it? How does that make it special?”

“It’s about context,” Sam replied, not taking his eyes from his computer in his lap. “Valentine’s Day gives people the context to do romantic things that they otherwise wouldn’t do. Like Halloween gives people an excuse to dress up.”

“What he said,” Dean agreed. “Buying a girl flowers is cheesy, but on Valentine’s Day, it’s okay to be cheesy as hell.”

Sam looked up. “Buying a girl flowers isn’t cheesy,” he protested.

“Cheese factor: eleven,” Dean replied, tossing a napkin across the room and missing the garbage can.

“Whatever,” Sam muttered, returning his gaze to the computer screen. “Luckily, nothing Valentine’s Day related seems to be popping up on the radar. Everything seems pretty quiet.”

“Good,” Cas said suddenly, standing. “Then I’m going out.”

Dean blinked. “For what?” He checked his watch. “It’s ten in the morning on a Friday.”

“You two need to eat something other than beer and Fritos,” Cas replied in the lofty tones of someone who is not a very accomplished liar. “It’s making my liver hurt just watching you, and I’m not even human anymore.”

“Whatever,” Dean said dismissively, waving a hand. “Just don’t get any rabbit food.”

“You aren’t rabbits,” was the last Dean heard as Cas slipped out the door.

Without Cas, the morning melted into a quiet early afternoon, Dean sprawled on the bed with a tattered paperback and Sam alternating between his computer and the newspaper Cas had abandoned until he finally cleared his throat. “So get this,” he said, and waited until he had Dean’s full attention before he went on, “Craigslist ad for a flash mob at the 64th street bus station. Says to show up with three candles, some catmint, and a picture of their sweetheart.”

Dean considered that for a moment. “Sounds like nothing.”

“Could be something,” Sam pressed.

“You just want it to be something because you’re bored.” The thought of getting up to put on a suit was unappealing to the point of being ridiculous. Dean cracked open the book again. “You go check it out if you’re so excited.”

“Fine. I will.”

Hours flowed by like warm honey, and Dean reveled in his lethargic haze of a Friday with nothing that needed doing. There were a scant few pages left in his book and the low angle of the sun had cast the room into a golden glow when the sound of a key card being pushed into the lock made Dean grimace.

“Nothing?” he asked, not looking up from the book as the door opened.

“What?”

Dean snapped the book shut over one placeholding finger. “Where’ve you been all…” he began before he trailed off.

Cas set the two plastic grocery bags on the table and turned, thrusting the flowers he held in his other hand toward Dean. “For you,” he said uselessly as Dean swung his legs around to sit on the edge of the bed.

Dean let out a soft exhalation that could have been a gentle laugh. “Cas, uh… you get flowers for someone you like. Not just anyone.”

“I’m aware of that, Dean.” Cas didn’t let his eyes fall.

“As in.. _.like_  like,” Dean expanded, a tiny wisp of something like panic igniting in his middle. “Wanna take their pants off.” He licked his lips. “Love.” Strange, how hard it was to say that word, as if it required practice.

Cas did not look away.

Dean swallowed and averted his eyes to his shoes, the pattern on the bedspread — anywhere that wasn’t Cas. “Cas, I… I’m flattered,” he said finally. “And…and touched. But I…”

“Dean,” Cas said, surprisingly gently, and despite himself Dean looked up and was trapped once again in the angel’s azure gaze. “If today gives you an excuse to do something you normally wouldn’t…take it. Please.”

They were daisies and some other pink flower, wrapped in pink cellophane and tied with a white ribbon. Dean stared at them for a long moment before taking a deep breath and standing.

“Carpe diem,” he said before taking the flowers with one hand and reaching for Cas’s face with the other.


	33. FICLET: Fading

Dean has four photographs of his mother.

Two of them are older than he is: old Polaroids of Mary Winchester before she was even Mary Winchester, the colors starting to fade and shift into a trendy photo filter, turquoises and magentas and yellows disproportionate, and they make Dean swallow because there are people who intentionally make their memories look like this, when this is all he has and they’re not even his. The acetate is brittle and the pencil label is no more than a gray smudge against the tattering white.

There is another worn, pockmarked photo, his mother holding a little blond boy. The boy looks like her, has her cheekbones and her jawline and her bright sunny locks and her smile. Well, Dean still has the cheekbones and the jawline, but he’d lost the blond shortly after he’d lost the mother. He hasn’t lost the smile, not completely, but he’s sure his mother never felt the bitter metal tinge to every smile like he does.

The last is a family photo, the gilt from the Olsen Mills logo in the corner rubbed away, the edges velvet with handling, the pebbled finish gone smooth in places from rubbing against the plastic of too many wallets to count. His father looks happy, his mother serene. Sam is hardly more than an oversized, fleshy potato wrapped in a blanket. And Dean hardly recognizes himself. Hardly recognizes anyone.

His memory of his mother, even with these photographs, is more a vague blonde woman shape, moving almost silently through his memories like a warm ghost. He rejects the images he’s seen, in Heaven and from shapeshifters, the young and feisty Mary Campbell he’d met and protected in his jaunt through a timestream that he couldn’t convince himself was his. Those weren’t his mother. Those weren’t Mom.

Mom is a concept, a construct, a scaffolding upon which he hangs memories too vague to summon without a long afternoon of sitting quietly, “Hey Jude” on repeat in his headphones, shaking loose the motes of memory lodged so far back in his mind that they almost belonged to someone else.

And, try as he might, the colors are fading.


	34. FICLET: Epiphany

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> contains season 9 finale spoilers.

He should go see the body.

If he knew Sam at all, it wouldn’t be burned yet, wouldn’t be ashes scattered to the winds. That would come later, after the bargaining and begging. Maybe it wouldn’t come at all.

Castiel’s mind shied away from the notion that perhaps Metatron hadn’t left enough remains to  burn. No. There was a body, a body with a stab wound somewhere fatal, and Castiel should go see it.

Instead, Castiel stared at the wall.

He should also examine the tattered, abandoned remains of Heaven. Everyone still inexplicably looked to him, as though they’d all forgotten shunning him just days before. He didn’t know why. Familiarity? Habit? He didn’t want them to. He didn’t want any of this. Didn’t want to hear the chatter on Angel Radio about him, didn’t want to turn and see blind obedience in the faces of those he encountered…

Castiel stared at the wall.

He’d wiped the blood from Metatron’s angel blade on his coat, after he’d confiscated it. Dean’s blood, smeared up to the hilt, rusty iron against the bright burnished silver, now a brown stain among the dust resting against his hip.

He should go see the body. Bid farewell. Perhaps seek Dean’s soul among the millions milling about in the Veil. He refused to consider the reality that he was more likely to have been dragged down by the weight of the Mark, that Dean was right back where Castiel had met him the first time, further gone and closer to losing his humanity than when Castiel had gripped his shoulder and raised him. A trip to the Veil was probably still within his power. Breaking into Hell was another matter.

He should go see the body. Before it decayed, before the flesh became sunken and yellow, before it was no longer recognizable.

He’d not actually said a single word to him. Castiel swallowed the burning swell in his throat. He’d watched Sam throw the bolt of the door and walked away, and that was the last Dean had seen of him. He’d — what was it that Metatron had said? He’d draped himself in the cape of heaven to save one man? And when Dean had needed him most…

It was an irrational hatred that welled up in Castiel’s chest, that Metatron had seen so clearly what Castiel had been struggling to understand, that he had spelled it out so baldly and condescendingly before telling him it was all for naught. The epiphany was too late, the sacrifices rendered useless.

He should go see the body.

He didn’t recall how he appeared in the Bunker; perhaps the portal allowed egress to any point on Earth. That would explain several things. He did not see Sam, though he did see an empty whiskey bottle, contents still filmed against its walls from a recent dash into a tumbler, and knew he had been there. So he was correct, and Sam had brought Dean home.

The door to Dean’s room was ajar, but there was a threshold there that seemed solid as a wall that Castiel steeled himself to push through. He owed Dean this much.

Castiel closed his eyes, stepped through the door, and opened them again.

And stopped.

Cold shot through to his fingertips, icy shock and realization seizing his chest in almost tangible impact.

Dean turned slowly, tucking a knife into his belt, and the familiar self-loathing smirk paired with the black eyes, the dark smear of Dean’s soul a shifting chaos of thorns and malice, made everything in Castiel cringe away.

“Means to an end,” Dean said flatly, turning away.

His Grace felt like it was writhing, trying to escape, as Castiel took a step closer. He ignored it. “Let me help.”  _I can fix this. I can still save you. I have another chance._

_Metatron, you had no idea what kind of story you were writing._


	35. FICLET: White Fire

“Dean.”

Dean freezes. His fingers tighten around the shot glass, his shoulders tense before he swears under his breath. He can’t pretend he didn’t hear, or pretend he didn’t recognize the voice. Too late for that now.

So he turns. Flicks his eyes to black, now that he has control over it. No one else in the bar will care, or even notice. Humans don’t pay attention to stupid little things like that.

It takes a lot of composure to not flinch.

He knew he could see the true form of angels, ever since he’d had to gank that one in Missoula. He’d seen them walking around, their Grace flickering between the amorphous will-o-the-wisps and some grand shape both terrifying and beautiful. But he’d never stopped to consider what Castiel’s true form might look like.

Even now, he has to blink because it’s difficult to look at. Dimmer than the other forms he’d seen, which only stands to reason, if the Grace he’d stolen is burning out. But it looks…angry. Not anger as a human emotion, but angry like a tsunami or a flash flood, an inexorable pouring of force that Dean has to consciously fight the urge to brace himself against.

He wishes he had some gum to snap. He settles for throwing back what is left of his whiskey before looking straight into Castiel’s eyes. “Cas. Long time no see.”

Could tsunamis boil? Fuck, how did Castiel have  _three_  pairs of wings? He’d only ever had the one in silhouettes. This wasn’t fair. Dean suppresses the shiver that resonates down his spine as all three pairs half-raise, bristling.

“Outside,” is all Castiel says, eyes darting to either side at the other patrons of the bar, who are paying no attention. It’s amazing how they can completely overlook a force of nature about ready to burst at the steadily fraying seams.

Dean throws a few bills on the bar. It’s probably enough. He doesn’t really care if it is or not.

The heat of the day is still rising from the pavement outside in the parking lot in ripples that Dean can see if he tries hard enough. It’s something to look at aside from the angel, at least.

“Dean.”

“Sixty-six percent of what you’ve said to me in the last five months has been my name, now,” Dean interjects. Whoa. Okay. Now the wings are totally unfurled and look to be — yup. They’re on fire. Blue fire. Castiel was a lot easier to deal with when Dean couldn’t see behind the scenes.

“I’m taking you to Cain.” Dean had never noticed how resonant Castiel’s voice was. Maybe it was the fire. “We’ll figure out a way to fix this.”

Dean spreads his hands. “Not broken. Working as intended, in fact.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. Not because they’re shaking, of course not — he just doesn’t know what else to do with them. “We done?”

“You and I,” Castiel says, and the flames are  _white_ , now, and nearly painful to look at, “are never done. I’ve dragged you out of Hell before. You didn’t want to go then, either. Do you remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Dean retorts. “Maybe it’s because I belong there. Because this is what I’m supposed to be. You ever think of that?”

“I can fix this,” Castiel insists, taking a step forward. “If I can’t…I have to end it. I have to.”

Dean shakes his head and turns on his heel. “Maybe stick to saving people who want to be saved, Cas. Not just people you want to save.”

He doesn’t turn back around. Castiel can’t angel zap anywhere anymore, and he doesn’t want to see the wings droop as he watches Dean walk away.


	36. FICLET: Hanging in its Memory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> end!verse, so you know it's bound to be depressing

Spinning heads, sensation, whispers and shouts and keening and the taste of Dean’s name finally infused with ecstasy on his tongue — real ecstasy, not the cheap chemical facsimile he’d become accustomed to later, but the triumph of Dean writhing under him, sweat salty and bitter with traces of gunpowder and finally, finally  _there_. Parts were forgotten — who had turned out the lights? How long did they lie there, waiting for the morning and inevitable death, before one of them rolled atop the other and began it all again, determined to live as furiously as possible before the dawn? Who had made the first move that tangled their limbs and shed their clothes and jumbled the bedsheets so hopelessly, and who kicked those bedsheets to join the clothes on the floor, one giant fabric sculpture of their impatient lust?

The details, perhaps, had been lost to fog, but the experience as a whole would never recede. If he was lucky, the bitter powders or tasteless pills brought it back for a time and he would lounge in a chair, eyes half-lidded, lost in a phantasm of memory that he wished his damnable mortal metabolism wouldn’t bring to an end. But it did, it always did, too soon for his comfort, and he’d get up and stretch sore muscles and roll his shoulders where his wings used to be and trudge outside to face him.

He said he didn’t remember. But he never looked Cas in the eye when he said it, and they both knew he was lying. The closest he’d ever come to acknowledging it had been as Cas wasted away in convalescence, the bones of his foot, the navicular and the cuboid, both of them shattered and the metatarsals along with them, the bruises making it all an exquisite agony that Cas wouldn’t have been able to stand had it not been for the stash he’d been secretly building ever since Dean had first denied that night. Dean, the Savior, the Righteous Man, the Fearless Leader, had sat next to him, so close that Cas could breathe his exhalations of the roach they passed back and forth, and they didn’t say a word that mattered.

Dean never denied the liaisons with other inhabitants of their camp, their bastion, their last stand, be they male or female or married or dead the next day. When Cas could walk again he was at every strategy session, went everywhere Dean told him to go. He killed the infected at Dean’s behest, stole from abandoned pharmacies, abstained from his cocktails only enough to avoid getting anyone under his command killed. Dean became the sun he orbited, the only thing in the sky bright enough to matter in the sky of the world the angels had left behind.

And then when Dean arrived — the other Dean, the Dean from Before, the Dean who still saw Cas with wings and had nothing to deny — tiny cracks shot through him like the crystalline fractures in an icy pond, jabs of shocked sobriety and a whisper that he could try again, they could make it mean something, that they could have a night neither of them would be able to forget or bury —

Until the Colt came back to camp.

Until the plan.

Until in the early morning, from his window, Cas glimpsed the Dean who wasn’t his and the Dean who had never really been his locked together in something he’d have to be dead to believe was an embrace.

And Cas put the orange bottles down. He tucked the powders and dried leaves away. The acid-laced papers, the flasks of hallucinogens, everything he’d saved for this final day, he left behind.

He’d spent one night welcoming death in the arms of a lover, his senses muddled, living as close to his skin as he could, and it had earned him this half-life of hanging in its memory. Maybe, if he faced down today sober and drawn into himself, curled around his hurts, Death would actually find him.


	37. FICLET: Yowl

The cat didn’t live in the motel, but the motel was still her home. Cas had seen her curled up a few times on the top of the soda machine — he didn’t know how she made it up there — and more than once had wiped her pawprints from the windshield of the old car he had terminally borrowed.

She was all gray, with bright green eyes, the sort of cat that usually didn’t end up as a stray, the sort of cat in fancy wet food commercials. She called herself a name that Cas didn’t have the proper vocal cords to pronounce, but in his mind, he called her Pii, which translated roughly from Enochian to “She is.” Phonetically, of course, it sounded rather unfortunate in English, which was why he only called her that in his head.

She nearly killed him one morning when he opened the door for the newspaper and she twined herself around his legs, almost tripping him. She never deigned to come inside — she did not like the smells of indoors — but since that morning he was careful to not move too quickly upon opening the door.

He wondered what she did when it snowed. There were always cars to sleep under, he supposed, but she was far from the rugged and stocky shape her cousins in the mountains boasted. He wondered what she ate. He debated leaving a dish of fresh water out for her, but worried it might attract other pests from the small belt of forest not far away. He did not think she would be able to hold her own in an altercation with a raccoon.

He first suspected she could sense when demons were near when she let out a gnarled yowl that made Cas wonder if someone had hurt her — until Cas had yanked the door open to check on her to find Crowley standing there instead, knuckles raised as though to knock. Cas knew cats tended to be able to pierce veils and glamours naturally. Once Crowley had left after an infuriating conversation about hypothetically, if Dean had lived, would Cas be willing to help track him down, Cas had walked to the gas station across the street and purchased a foil pouch of cat treats. They smelled hideous but Pii took one from Cas’s fingers with dainty teeth and purred.

He didn’t give her a treat every day. He wanted her to remain self-sufficient long after he’d packed up the maps and newpapers in his room and left for another motel not worth naming, somewhere else, chasing problems that didn’t exist until he showed up and began asking questions to tease them out of small town secrets. But especially on days that it rained, he would open his door and crouch on the worn doormat and wait for her to trot expectantly up to him. He would wash the fishy meat smell from his fingers and wonder how many other people took time to get to know her as well as he did.

Given Crowley’s topic of conversation, Cas was not as astounded as he could have been when he received the text from Dean, asking if they could meet. He’d responded with as much aplomb as was possible to convey in a text message, giving the address of the motel, and nearly broke out in a sweat when Dean responded that he was close and would be there within an hour.

He took a shower. He ironed his shirt. He tidied away the detritus of haphazard motel living. He picked at a hangnail. He rose from the edge of the bed when he heard the rumble and growl of the Impala’s engine as it pulled into the empty spot next to Cas’s car.

And then his heart stopped, his breath catching in his chest, when Pii began to yowl as the engine died.


	38. FICLET: Sense

In meeting your gaze, Dean…hesitates.

Does he sense the golden, incandescent thread that ties you to him, strong as the thickest chains and yet frail as gossamer, able to weather the most violent of storms but liable to break at the softest wrong utterance? Does he feel the clash of forces beneath your ribs, the reverberation of the bell tolling through the Heavens announcing that Castiel has Fallen, not for humankind, not for humanity, no, but for a single, frail, damaged yet infinite human soul?

He can’t. He can’t possibly. But your breath catches as he meets your eyes, and you lock for seconds that are millennia, laid bare to the core of yourself and it is only because he is human that you know he does not, cannot, understand the depth, the intense infiltration that is  _him_ , in every sense that you have come to know. He colors your perception of the world until you don’t know how to view it without his lens, he is all that has ever been good or bad of Humanity and everything lashed to it. You are lost, tossed about in uncertainty and chaos, but you will resist being Found if you have to fight to your last breath.

Dean hesitates in meeting your gaze, but meet it he does, and the world  _sings_.


	39. Five First Kisses

Sweat runs into his eyes and it stings. His eyelashes are gummy with blood from the gash on his forehead. Maybe it's someone else's blood splashed on his face. Breathing is like fire and focusing his eyes is beyond him.

And then a cold hand at his cheek, a dizzying rush of flying apart and --

"Thanks," he mumbles, but Cas doesn't let him go. The angel kneels down. Their faces are close, and maybe the adrenaline is just demanding an outlet but he reaches out his own hand to grasp the stubbled cheek and --

That was their first battle kiss, heady and desperate and salty with sweat and blood.

* * *

 

The water is hot. It's been hot for some time, the steam fogging the mirror and beading in droplets on the metal doorknob. Neither of them notice the shower is ready for them until they break away from one another, gasping, hearts pounding. Bare skin a palette of goosebumps and bruises and dried blood, flushed from heat and unmistakable arousal. He steps into the shower first, and Cas follows. 

The water is too hot, but he doesn't care as he pulls Cas to him, presses their mouths together to sate the cavernous desire that has claimed them both. Water pounds at his back against his aching shoulders and Cas's hand grips the back of his neck as wet skin glides against wet skin.

That was their first shower kiss, slick and hungry and prelude to a tumultuous release.

* * *

 

Fullness, intrusion, a deep ache that he still somehow welcomes as he breathes deep, willing his muscles to relax. He doesn't know how they got here, can't remember more than snatches. Cas reaching down with slicked fingers. Cas's pupils dilated so the blue was the slimmest penumbra. Cas asking, over and over, and Dean affirms, over and over, yes, yes, _yes_.

Cas's eyes flutter closes as he rocks his hips forward, rhythm and finesse abandoning him as he topples over the edge. Leaning down with trembling weariness, their lips snatch against one another, sloppy, as Cas reaches between them to bring Dean to his own climax.

That was their first sex kiss, high on the waves of passion and bliss and affirmation of how intertwined they are.

* * *

 

Laconic warmth, lazy well-being. The sheets rustle as Cas shifts. Cold against Dean's back as Cas goes up on one elbow to hover over Dean, leans down to brush his lips against Dean's cheek.

Dean lets him, then twists and pulls Cas's body weight down atop him. He revels in it, clutches Cas to him as he drags his teeth along Cas's lower lip. He can feel his body's feeble rally, nowhere near recovered from the too-recent bout but already wanting.

That was their first afterglow kiss, slow and searching, tongues of wet silk against each other in the intoxicating slurry of spent arousal stirring for another round.

* * *

 

Coffee. The aroma wafts into the bedroom and he can't pretend he's asleep anymore. He aches all over, aches in places he didn't know he could ache, and he stumbles into the kitchen.

Cas hands him a mug but before Dean can take a sip, he pulls Dean close. He knows what Cas wants, tips his chin down and meets Cas's lips. He tastes of the bitter black brew and of snow and thunder and Dean closes his eyes and allows himself to get lost for the bare moment before he pulls away.

That was their first morning-after kiss, casual and tender and speaking of all the potential for every kiss to come after.


	40. FICLET: Habit

On the rare occasions he can afford the luxury, Dean is a creature of habit.

He always puts his right shoe on first. Always shocks himself with a quick blast of cold water before getting out of the shower. Always adds just one sugar to the otherwise black coffee. Small things, things that ground him to an otherwise limnal life where nothing is constant and next week is ephemeral. 

Which is why, when he gets to his bedroom and sees Cas on  _his_ side of the bed, Dean’s steps stutter like a broken gear.

It’s not a big deal. Cas even being in his bed is still a new enough thing that the tiny thrill of it hasn’t yet worn away into familiarity. Technically, Dean and Cas have only had “sides” for a week.

But…it was still  _his_  side of the bed.

With a suppressed sigh, Dean pulls back the covers on Cas’s side of the bed. All that empty space on the wrong side is going to throw him off all night.

But at the stirring of the linens, Cas stretches, and with a weary smile, rolls to the side of the bed Dean had been about to inhabit.

“I warmed up your side for you,” he says, sleep-slurred, settling into the pillow. He pats the rumpled bedsheet where he had been, the hollow in the memory foam beginning to fill, and tugs at the covers to lay them over the spot.

Astonished, Dean climbs over Cas and burrows under the warm blankets, and doesn’t protest when Cas scoots to press his back snug against Dean’s front. As sleep drags at Dean’s eyelids, he lets out a slow sigh of contentment against Cas’s dark locks. This sort of thing was something he wouldn’t mind getting used to.


	41. DRABBLE: He Says

“Dean.” **  
**

Cas says his name and the sound hooks into his brain and holds him, his attention snapping to like a lodestone. He says it like a beacon, this time, a flag, but Dean remembers times when he’s said it like a caress. Said it like it was soft, said it like it was made of clear ice cracking under too much weight, said it like it was velvet wrapped around broken glass.

He’s said it thrumming with anguish, with dread, with quiet concern. He’s used it to bludgeon. He’s used it to wear away at walls, wheedling, coaxing, begging. He’s whispered it, he’s shouted it, he’s moaned it with jagged edges of pain that sounded just enough like a lover’s rough cry that it stood out, uncomfortably enticing in its tones of burgundies and blacks, in the fresco of Dean’s auditory memory.

He’s said it so devoid of hope it made Dean’s heart break, and so jubilant it sang. He’s said it in the golden amber tones of fine whiskey, in tumultuous echoes of a winter storm, in soft fields of cotton-tipped grass warmed by the summer sun, in the crystalline shine off the back of a dragonfly.

He says it now, and Dean looks at him, and doesn’t want to imagine a life where he never hears it fall from his lips again.


	42. SHORT: It's Complicated

Cas touched a knuckle to a bead of condensation that had begun crawling down the side of the bottle’s brown glass; the surface tension on the droplet burst and Cas lifted away half the droplet to examine, turning his hand this way and that. Dean watched Cas’s careful study for the space of several heartbeats before he asked, in a soft voice so as not to startle the angel, “What do you see?”

“Hmm?” Cas flicked his eyes upward at Dean.

“You were looking at it pretty hard. What did you see that was so special?”

“Oh.” Cas shrugged, grabbing the bottle and lifting it to his lips. “It’s...complicated,” he said after a long sip. 

Dean swallowed a sip of his own. “Try me,” he offered.

Cas nodded once, eyes softening to a vague focus on nothing in particular. “I can see,” he began slowly, as though tasting the words before he said them, “the path that every molecule of water had to take to get to this point, and every path it could have taken instead. I can see the ancestors of every bacterium, delve into their DNA and tell where and when the mutations occurred that allowed that particular strand of DNA to survive and multiply. I can see the molecules of silica that dissolved from the glass into the water, and track the atoms that build them back and back and back to the heart of the star that forged them. I can see molecular forces at work, keeping the water separate from the bacteria and the silica suspended.” His eyes shifted back to Dean, and his face shifted ever so slightly into the smile that wasn’t quite there. “There’s a lot to be getting on with in a drop of water.”

Dean blinked. “And you can see that all the time? With everything?”

Another shrug, another sip. “More or less. It’s a matter of attention. You can see the buttons on Sam’s shirt all the time, but that doesn’t mean you constantly count them, or even notice them.”

Dean paused to consider this while Cas lapsed into his usual companionable silence. He looked down at the picnic table they sat on, their feet on the bench, and felt the wood grain beneath his fingers. He supposed, if he thought about it, he could mentally build the history of the table, but it wasn’t something that he would register as knowing unless he tried. The idea of having that much information all the time made his head ache.

“Do you enjoy inebriation?” Cas asked, breaking the silence of the night.

Looking up, Dean took in the angel studying him. “Sometimes,” he replied. “I mean, you gotta hit the fuzzy sweet spot. It’s a small target, right between ‘feeling nothing’ and ‘feeling out of control.’ Don’t you like it?”

Cas cocked his head in consideration. “I don’t feel it, exactly,” he said slowly. “I’m aware of the metabolic effects on my vessel. But I’m not wired into my vessel as a human consciousness is wired into its body.”

Cas was rarely this talkative, but then, he rarely offered conversation regarding things that captured Dean’s interest so completely. “How do you mean?”

“I’ve told you before: my true form dwarfs the Eiffel Tower, if it’s translated into physical space. Luckily, I don’t have a physical form. The part of me that is here is a projection into this vessel, like a...like a hand into a glove.” He seemed pleased with his simile. “I can manipulate the vessel -- the glove -- to do anything that would be physically possible for the glove to do, but I myself am not limited by the restraints of the glove. The rest of me that isn’t in the projection, for the purposes of this metaphor, would be the musculature and bone structure and nervous and sensory system and everything that controls the hand inside the glove, but most of which is not actually in the hand.” 

Nodding slowly, Dean was about to lift his beer to his lips again before a thought struck him that sent a cold streak through his gut. “Cas?” he ventured. “What happened when you were suddenly human?”

With a speed that twisted the icy spear in Dean’s stomach, Cas’s face was wiped blank as he looked down at the empty bottle in his hands. “To continue with the metaphor,” he said after a long pause, “I was just the hand. Blind, deaf, numb except for the most basic reflexes and even those deadened to almost nothing. No support structures, nothing to fall back on or draw away to. And…” Cas shook his head. “Biological systems run on intensely complex feedback loops. Even consciousness is a feedback loop, amino acids bumping into each other in specified ways, only the laws of physics preventing random collisions. It’s one thing to witness that system and know how it works, and another entirely to suddenly  _ be _ that system. To  _ feel _ pain.  _ Feel _ anger. Hunger. Lust.” He closed his eyes as though to ward off the memory. “I can contemplate the universe of a water droplet with perfect clarity and understanding. But experiencing emotion as a human is, simply put, overwhelming.”

Dean licked his lips and tried for a smile. “It’s not that bad.”

“It is,” Cas disagreed simply. “I don’t know that I’d be able to do it again.”

Silence stretched, the dusty light of dusk receding to true darkness as the words burned the roof of his mouth. “But would you?” he finally asked. “Would you try? If...if it came to that?”

The question had come out all wrong, an inquiry too heavy for the fragile scaffolding of their new intimacy to support. Dean wondered if, had he been an angel, he could wipe the vibrations from the air before they reached Cas’s ears and only he would ever know he’d uttered them.

But the corner of Cas’s mouth quirked in the tiniest of smiles and he reached out one hand to cover Dean’s. “If it came to that,” he said in a quiet rumble, “you’re the only one I would try it for.”

Venus shone against a backdrop of muted purples and oranges, behind the black silhouettes of trees on the horizon. Frogs in a pond began their chorus of courtship. And on a weathered picnic table, an angel and a human held hands; the angel held hands with the tumultuous cascade that was human love, and the human held hands with the staidness of eternity. Neither completely understood the other, and likely never would -- but as luck would have it, they likely would never need to.


End file.
